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Was it really necessary to include missile infodumps, or is that part of the joke?
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Apr 15, 2020 05:08
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my alternate history novel of the late 2010s wherein the point of divergence is that baen barflies never talked david weber out of killing Honor off at the end of At All Costs
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Apr 15, 2020 05:25
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prior to reading battuta's fanfic i had never questioned weber's creative decision to give pritchard's hornt up bodyguard a last name, thiessen, that sounds so similar to theisman's weber's writing is so bloated that that you almost don't notice minor niggling detail things like that, which stand out in something more economical
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Apr 15, 2020 09:16
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Weber's bad about similar-sounding names, both with people and planets. One of the most egregious examples is that the list of plot-important planets includes Mesa, Maya, Meyers, Montana, Manticore, and Monica. Way too many M-names, and some are almost identical anyway.
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Apr 15, 2020 18:32
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There's an Admiral Roszak and an Admiral Rosiak. In the same book.
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Apr 15, 2020 18:57
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FuturePastNow posted:There's an Admiral Roszak and an Admiral Rosiak. In the same book. Ha ha, I'm German, we pronounce those names completely different, puny Anglo
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Apr 15, 2020 19:51
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quantumfoam posted:Tree fell early last morning at my place from the hurricanes, lost all power + internet. Power + internet is back on, checking in on thread..... I use the Baen Free CD ones, which might be why they have such janky formatting. I've had them forever so might as well get some use out of the one good thing Baen has ever done. Also what I do is, I copy the chapter into a text editor and then use that to insert notes. Helps a lot. Kallikaa posted:I've seen the Honor Harrington series described as CS Forester's Hornblower series 'but in SPACE!' which, going by what's posted here, I don't get since there seems to be no similarity at all? The similarities are there, but it's largely that he uses various plot points and moments from Horatio Hornblower and then remixes them. Like the first two books largely cover all the plot points of the first Hornblower book, except that all of Britain's mistakes are given to the France stand-in, who... are actually not in the first Hornblower book at all. And that's pretty much the big thing of the series. Manticore and Honor are Britain and Hornblower with all of their actual negatives stripped away and given to others. In fact the first book's entire plot relies on Manticore not being allowed to be completely imperialist. In the coming books, the duels in Horatio Hornblower are done in largely similiar fashions, though dumber. And Honor's actual romance is similar to Hornblower's as well. Libluini posted:Please don't argue Manticore's magical bullshit technology is retroactively changing the laws of the universe just so you can win an argument on the internet, because that's dumb. Hell, the very first major battles between Haven and Manticore involved tons of maneuver and the Havenite admiral in the largest one pulls exactly what was talked about : He retreats with most of his force intact. Nah, I'm not gonna agree I'm wrong. If I feel that I'm wrong I will say I'm wrong. I am very capable of it. I mean, maneuvering exists, but the idea that there's 'weeks of maneuvering' in battles and that you can't have decisive battles with missiles is proven wrong as early as the second book, wherein, as stated, they have a lightning quick battle that's stated to be decisive because they immediately got into missile range and unloaded. Anyways, the problem with all the talk about "eventually they WILL find your hidden base" is that yeah sure rumors exist, but rumors take a lot of time to get around thanks to how long information takes to get around the Honorverse. If it ever does. That's a huge thing in the later books especially, where the Solarian League constantly gets hosed because they're always months behind information because they do not have FTL comms. And hell, there's a lot of massive secret bases around the Honorverse that take forever to be discovered, much less short-term refuelling stops. Like Bolthole takes a very long time to find by Manticore who knows it exists and where at, and it's set in an actual system with huge amounts of people in it, and Manticore has its Spy setting set to maximum. Also why would ships arrive in bad shape? Tooling around in space just outside systems unseen for extended periods of time seem like it doesn't have real problem. The first book's entire climax is that there's a Haven fleet stationed not far from the Basilisk System, apparently for a month+ considering the timeline of the plan they had and the fact that it got kicked off very early, waiting for the Sirius or the diplomatic ship to flee and contact them. Unless they could overhaul themselves in the middle of space, a long flight and then sitting and resting doesn't seem to hurt ships too much. And with that above, you don't need to just immediately fly into a system and charge into it with your attack. If your entire fleet is going in at once you can literally stop anywhere and rest and it'd be incredibly unlikely for a fleet to stumble onto you while you recover. I actually have examples of this stuff in the Honorverse, so I can't be too wrong, you know. Oh hey the Infodumps are back. Finally. I'll be able to dig out some choice stuff now. Kchama fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Apr 16, 2020 |
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Apr 16, 2020 03:51
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kchama and libluini u should chillout Libluini posted:Ha ha, I'm German, we pronounce those names completely different, puny Anglo it was regrettable when Germany was destroyed in Earth's Final War, causing all remaining humans to be English
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Apr 16, 2020 04:53
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quantumfoam posted:Tree fell early last morning at my place from the hurricanes, lost all power + internet. Power + internet is back on, checking in on thread..... Oof, sorry to hear that. Hope you're OK. The Manticore rule is now dropped, turns out it wasn't that funny. PupsOfWar posted:kchama and libluini u should chillout Also this. I'm the Book Barn IK. Feel free to PM me or email bookbarnsecretsanta@gmail.com if I can help you with anything.
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Apr 16, 2020 05:17
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PupsOfWar posted:kchama and libluini u should chillout Safety Biscuits posted:Oof, sorry to hear that. Hope you're OK. The Manticore rule is now dropped, turns out it wasn't that funny. Fair. I was actually coming back to edit my post to be less hostile, so don't worry about me.
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Apr 16, 2020 05:20
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It wasn't that big a deal, but thanks.
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Apr 16, 2020 05:23
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I love how every argument I had was defeated by Weber's bad writingPupsOfWar posted:it was regrettable when Germany was destroyed in Earth's Final War, causing all remaining humans to be English the book I've just started reading has the evil dictator of the US threatening to release deadly diseases to stop an uprising against him it's amazingly prescient, minus the multiple wars against Japan, those didn't happen
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Apr 16, 2020 08:44
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Libluini posted:I love how every argument I had was defeated by Weber's bad writing Yeah, it's pretty great. I mean, I'm sorry I got aggro. I was actually right with Weber's dumb in-universe stuff and had examples to back it up, so I got a little hot-headed. Forgive?
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Apr 16, 2020 09:12
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Kchama posted:Forgive? Don't worry, nothing to forgive there, I'm coming from a family where we all communicated exclusively by yelling and sarcastic remarks, someone angrily typing on the internet doesn't even register as aggression by me. If you one day show up at my door and rip it from its angles, that'll be different.
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Apr 16, 2020 10:53
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Libluini posted:I love how every argument I had was defeated by Weber's bad writing *yet
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Apr 16, 2020 13:22
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tbf I always thought Old Earth's Final War sounded pretty metal*, weber should have picked that as the topic of a ghostwritten prequel series rather than the incredibly boring "edward saganami fights pirates" books he wrote with timothy zahn *yes i know it's just the same thing as the WW3 in star trek Libluini posted:
what book
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Apr 16, 2020 22:04
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Those are really good chapters General Battuta, don't have a forum account over there so I'm posting here. It feels like a new fresh story and the characters feel more alive. Keep it up
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Apr 16, 2020 22:19
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If I were less lazy I would actually turn the endless meeting scenes into something more interesting to read, rather than just spicing up the dialogue and characters. Like use some of the freed-up wordcount into subplots and development for the 9524 characters. But I am lazy!
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Apr 16, 2020 22:56
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I for one am enjoying the rewrite. For a start, I am not almost immediately starting to skim until something interesting happens, unlike the original version. Also the Solarian side having recognisable motivations and not merely being Dick Dastardly caricatures is a vast improvement.
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Apr 17, 2020 00:20
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quote:By far the largest expenditures, however, had gone into long-cherished Progressive and Liberal social programs. High Ridge himself regarded them as nothing more than vote-buying boondoggles, and he was certain Descroix shared his view, whatever she might say for public consumption. But New Kiev was another matter. She truly believed that the "poor" of the Star Kingdom were destitute . . . despite the fact that the poorest of them enjoyed an effective income at least four times that of the average citizen of their Grayson allies, and somewhere around seven or eight times that of the average Havenite living in the financially ravaged Republic. She and her fellow Liberals were determined to build a new "fairer and more equitable Star Kingdom" in which the "indecent wealth of the monied classes" would be redistributed by government fiat, since the normal operation of the marketplace seemed incapable of doing so. This is from a later book but I was remembering the Infodump about how Manticoreans are hyper wealthy to the point that even the stable-boys are millionaires.... It's funny, despite Weber's framing... New Kiev isn't necessarily wrong at all. Her words and Weber's framing are not incompatible at all. Never mind that the Star King's moneyed class is, in deed, indecently wealthy. We find out in the first book that Hauptmann basically is basically the equivalent of our 1% in and of himself. And at this point Honor's pretty close to as rich as he is. So even if the people of Manticore have more money on the whole, this doesn't mean that the poorest can't be destitute. Kchama fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Apr 18, 2020 |
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Apr 18, 2020 02:05
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This gets into this gets into the concept of "wealth as a relative" versus "wealth as an absolute". Weber's clearly on the side of the argument that relative wealth is less important as long as the absolute level of the bottom is high enough. That passage is from War of Honor (2002), and Shadow of Saganimi (2004) (probably not long enough a gap to cause a major change in viewpoint) has this passage:quote:"The truth is that while the situation on Kornati isn't actually anywhere near so bad as Nordbrandt's agit-prop paints it, it isn't good. In fact, it's pretty damned bad. You saw the slum areas in Thimble while you were in Spindle?" Terekhov nodded, and Van Dort waved a hand. "Well, the housing in Thimble's slums is two or three notches above the quality of housing available in Karlovac's. And the social support payments on Kornati have only about sixty percent of the buying power of equivalent safety net stipends on Flax. Starvation isn't much of a problem, because the government does heavily subsidize food for those receiving social support, but it's no damned picnic to be poor there." This reinforces the same obvious interpretation - income inequality is a problem when it wipes out the middle class and pushes the poor down below a minimum standard of living. The competing view, which you seem to subscribe to, is that wealth is purely relative - no matter how good somebody has it in absolute terms, there is still a vast problem if the dichotomy between richest and poorest is wide enough. This is where the dissonance comes in. Weber portrays New Kiev as wrong because he views the poorest Manticorans as having such comfortable lives that they're fine. You consider her as not wrong because a vast difference in wealth is a problem in and of itself no matter what. Neither viewpoint is wholly right. Weber's worldview can lead to a floor of "pretty drat bad" being accepted "good enough" because it is being compared to absolutely terrible conditions, while the competing one is vulnerable to Tall Poppy Syndrome. Incidentally, this same passage may be the source of your earlier statement here: Kchama posted:I'm willing to be wrong but my memory was that it was a Manticorean collaborator being all smug about their victory. quote:"Gentlemen," Rajkovic replied gently, "I don't believe that either. I'm not certain it's fair to say Mr. Van Dort does, for that matter. However, I think honesty compels us to admit we don't exactly represent a perfectly equitable regime, either." Which isn't gloating -it is, in fact, pointing out that they have a serious problem- but is close enough that it is probably what you were remembering.
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Apr 18, 2020 21:21
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PupsOfWar posted:what book Die Macht der Drei by Hans Dominik
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Apr 18, 2020 21:57
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Gnoman posted:This gets into this gets into the concept of "wealth as a relative" versus "wealth as an absolute". Weber's clearly on the side of the argument that relative wealth is less important as long as the absolute level of the bottom is high enough. That passage is from War of Honor (2002), and Shadow of Saganimi (2004) (probably not long enough a gap to cause a major change in viewpoint) has this passage: Actually, what I'm saying is that just because you're relatively wealthier than someone, it doesn't mean you have a good standard of living. Like, I personally am probably much relatively richer than someone living in a stereotypical third world country, but I'm not gonna say that I live a comfortable life. And that is frankly how I feel Weber sees Manticore working, except he doesn't see that people at the bottom have it bad. And the the wealth inequality must be staggering if one dude sucks up almost all of the trade money. And in fact, if most of the trade money goes through Hauptmann, then the Manticorean government can't have THAT much money. It feels like Weber thinks that all the trade money is deposited directly into the Manticorean government, which generates wealth independently that trickles down to the rest of Manticore, because otherwise the rest of Manticore should not be rich. In fact, it should actually be along the lines of Britain at the time, where there were some staggeringly rich people at the top, but also a lot of dirt poor. Because even though Britain was incredibly rich, all the money stayed in the hands of the few. I mean I know Manticore Must Be Perfect Except For The Perfidious Opposition, but if government money really trickled down enough to make everyone Reasonable Rich than most people can probably never vote because they can't pay more in taxes than they can receive from the government (and, also Manticore's taxes are extremely low, which should also make it much more difficult for them to pay for trillions in starships).
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Apr 19, 2020 00:20
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Kchama posted:Actually, what I'm saying is that just because you're relatively wealthier than someone, it doesn't mean you have a good standard of living. Like, I personally am probably much relatively richer than someone living in a stereotypical third world country, but I'm not gonna say that I live a comfortable life. And that is frankly how I feel Weber sees Manticore working, except he doesn't see that people at the bottom have it bad. To underline this, there are plenty of communities in America which have effectively no access to healthcare, or clean water, etc despite having more money than people living in the third world. What matters is the material conditions people live under, and income is an unreliable proxy for that. We don’t know what life is like for the poor on Manticore because Weber never really writes about them. But I doubt they have that much given the political and economic power that the very wealthy are shown to possess and the lack of depiction of countervailing institutions like organized labor. We could also read into the text and say that things like Harkness staying in the military even though he’s had no career success indicate that civilian life is pretty lame for the lower classes.
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Apr 19, 2020 00:54
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Kchama posted:Actually, what I'm saying is that just because you're relatively wealthier than someone, it doesn't mean you have a good standard of living. Like, I personally am probably much relatively richer than someone living in a stereotypical third world country, but I'm not gonna say that I live a comfortable life. And that is frankly how I feel Weber sees Manticore working, except he doesn't see that people at the bottom have it bad. What you're describing is the danger of Weber's worldview, with an implicit assumption that this is how it MUST be happening. Weber is describing the situation working in ideal fashion, with the bottom rung making more than enough to keep themselves comfortable and a relatively small number of people succeeding in spectacular fashion, which helps everybody by creating more job opportunities. If you want to argue that it never works this way for long, that's reasonable, and it is also reasonable to use "this won't work" as a criticism of the work as a whole. It is not, however, reasonable to say "Within the context of the work, the author is obviously lying and there's a massive underclass". Weber doesn't describe the Manticoran internal economy in any great detail (one of your chronic and justified complaints), but one of the later books does go into some. Most of the government's money is spent by the government, not paid out in subsidies or given out as social support. What they don't spend on warships or government infrastructure is carefully invested, with great care to do most of that investing outside of the system to avoid inflation while boosting markets, and then counting on the private sector to service the markets being developed. In his assumed world, virtually nobody is getting direct subsidies (the fact that geriatrics is currently an extinct branch of medicine, most disabilities are routinely corrected in vitro, vaccinated against, or simply eliminated from the gene pool, and the majority of people who suffer a crippling injury can simply regrow new body parts doesn't hurt here as far as cutting costs dramatically) - instead they're working construction, manufacturing, or service jobs made possible by government investment. akulanization posted:To underline this, there are plenty of communities in America which have effectively no access to healthcare, or clean water, etc despite having more money than people living in the third world. What matters is the material conditions people live under, and income is an unreliable proxy for that. Not only do we see nobody coming in with a "they paid for my college" or "hey, it is a living" justification weakens that argument, as does a few characters who ruminate on losing money by enlisting. A lot of senior noncommissioned officers stay in the military despite little room for career advancement because they like being senior NCOs. In the specific case you raise, Harkness declines promotion more than once because he's made it to top NCO grade and does not want to be an officer. Gnoman fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Apr 19, 2020 |
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Apr 19, 2020 00:56
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Gnoman posted:What you're describing is the danger of Weber's worldview, with an implicit assumption that this is how it MUST be happening. Weber is describing the situation working in ideal fashion, with the bottom rung making more than enough to keep themselves comfortable and a relatively small number of people succeeding in spectacular fashion, which helps everybody by creating more job opportunities. If you want to argue that it never works this way for long, that's reasonable, and it is also reasonable to use "this won't work" as a criticism of the work as a whole. It is not, however, reasonable to say "Within the context of the work, the author is obviously lying and there's a massive underclass". I'm less calling him a liar and more pointing out that there's holes and contradictions in his worldbuilding that causes my complaints. Also, Weber has said at points that Manticore actually has a very robust welfare system, which is at odds with everyone being rich because of government jobs (and I wouldn't consider 'government investment' and only that to be a robust welfare system). Never mind the government shouldn't have the money to pay for one of the most powerful military's in the universe which literally spends trillions just on starships much less missiles (when squads are loaded with apparently millions of missiles that cost millions each), plus being able to have apparently massive domestic spending that leaves everyone a millionaire without needing any sort of welfare at all... just off the back of tariffs. Never mind that money isn't the end-all be-all with resources. To be fair, it's also very begging belief that Haven can maintain it's military at all considering the situation it's suppose to be in, but Manticore being entirely "every good trait of Age Of Sail Britain plus all the good traits it didn't have" leaves it in a badly-written position.
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Apr 19, 2020 01:14
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Kchama posted:I'm less calling him a liar and more pointing out that there's holes and contradictions in his worldbuilding that causes my complaints. In which case I've misunderstood you. This is a problem of a gaping hole, because it pretty clearly isn't supposed to be all the money coming from the government. There's references to independent shipping firms (of which Hauptmann is merely the largest), and a major plot point in book 5? is that those lines will have to shut down if the Navy doesn't Do Something to protect their investments. The problem is that Weber's so laser-focused on the military that he doesn't actually establish what those firms are trading, and it would be trivial to do so. Just inserting some goods into the Customs sequences to establish what legitimate traffic looks like in the first book would have helped a lot for this, but we see more evidence of what the OFS protectorates produce and sell than we do the main nation. You've hammered Weber for this a few times, and it is wholly correct to do so.
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Apr 19, 2020 01:27
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Gnoman posted:In which case I've misunderstood you. It's called a Doylist Perspective, taking things from a real-world perspective as compared to the Watsonian Perspective, taking things from an in-universe context only, that you tend to take. There's nothing wrong with either, mind you. But I just wanted to clarify that. I honestly couldn't tell you anything about Manticore's economy beyond that Hauptman and Honor have two massively rich corporations. Also he has some contradictions there as originally the totality of Manticore's trading firms was less than the top three Solarian trading firms individually, and Haven had trading. But by the final book the Solarian League has no trading firms and Haven has no trading. I think it's kind of ironic that someone who bills himself as a historian has trouble seeing the human side of wars. You don't need to go into full depth but you gotta keep it together enough to be consistent at least. I kind of feel like he wanted as few details as possible so he could have Schrodinger's Manticore, so to speak. Kind of like how the Royalist and Crown parties have very few displayed policies beyond Prepare For War, but the Opposition Parties all have pretty firmly-stated policies, put in the mouth of Literal Hitlers to keep them from being attractive.
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Apr 19, 2020 02:17
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Kchama posted:It's called a Doylist Perspective, taking things from a real-world perspective as compared to the Watsonian Perspective, taking things from an in-universe context only, that you tend to take. There's nothing wrong with either, mind you. But I just wanted to clarify that. There's some merit to that, except that the Conservative Association doesn't much of a policy either beyond "gently caress you, Got Mine". The various flavors of liberal do have more concrete policies, although it is quite interesting to see how many of the ones that do crop up are pretty agreed with by avowed Crown Loyalists and Centrists - the ban on dueling, hunting the slave trade, weakening the power of the Lords. There's a few places that are hard to justify without some heavy duty retconning, although you can almost force them into alignment. Two such cases are in the second book.
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Apr 19, 2020 02:34
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Gnoman posted:There's some merit to that, except that the Conservative Association doesn't much of a policy either beyond "gently caress you, Got Mine". The various flavors of liberal do have more concrete policies, although it is quite interesting to see how many of the ones that do crop up are pretty agreed with by avowed Crown Loyalists and Centrists - the ban on dueling, hunting the slave trade, weakening the power of the Lords. To be fair FYGM is a pretty standard conservative policy. Honestly the really baffling thing is that the split is all entirely focused on the war so that all of the 'far-left' and 'far-right' parties are allied together.
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Apr 19, 2020 03:19
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The main thing Manticore exports is technology. Like us, they don't sell the best stuff, but export tech that's a generation behind whatever the RMN is fielding. An example given is Erewhon, which builds a fleet of pod dreadnoughts armed with dual-drive missiles and that's done with extensive Manticoran support. And Erewhon turns around and starts building similar ships for the Maya sector's secret independence navy. Then there's the Talbott Cluster and Silesia, and everywhere else presumably, to which Manticore sells tons of industrial machinery and construction equipment.Honor Among Enemies posted:Caparelli sat back with an unwilling sense of agreement, for Hauptman was right. The Confederacy's weak central government had always made it a risky place, but its worlds were huge markets for the Star Kingdom's industrial products, machinery, and civilian technology transfers, not to mention an important source of raw materials. And however much Caparelli might personally dislike Hauptman, the magnate had every right to demand the Navy's help. It was, after all, one of the Navy's primary missions to protect Manticoran commerce and citizens, and prior to the present war, the Royal Manticoran Navy had done just that in Silesia. That's from pretty early in the 6th? book. Technology is going out and raw materials are coming back. Manticore also sells ships; what do they do when they commission a new class of destroyer or cruiser that obsoletes an older class? They sell the old ships to one of their friendly neighbors. And then their defense contractors get to export spare parts and support.
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Apr 19, 2020 03:50
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FuturePastNow posted:The main thing Manticore exports is technology. Like us, they don't sell the best stuff, but export tech that's a generation behind whatever the RMN is fielding. An example given is Erewhon, which builds a fleet of pod dreadnoughts armed with dual-drive missiles and that's done with extensive Manticoran support. And Erewhon turns around and starts building similar ships for the Maya sector's secret independence navy. Then there's the Talbott Cluster and Silesia, and everywhere else presumably, to which Manticore sells tons of industrial machinery and construction equipment. Yeah I mean I know that much about the private economy, since HAuptman's entire thing is trading stuff like that. I guess I should say i don't know what your average joe does for cash. And selling old ships is not a profitable venture. It might recoup some of the costs, but given that it's an old ship you've already spent way more than you could ever get back from it. Note that WE don't sell our allies our old stuff because it makes us money, far be it. It's even specifically mentioned by Weber that all the weapon sales to Erewhon and the other lesser members of the Grand Alliance are done at huge cost to Manticore, and in fact that on the whole the lesser members are all huge drains that Manticore funds and arms out of a sense of honor. 'Breaking even' on it is seen as a distant dream. EDIT: poo poo I forgot my own post a while ago. Rewording Kchama fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Apr 19, 2020 |
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Apr 19, 2020 04:10
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Kchama posted:Yeah I mean I know that much about the private economy, since HAuptman's entire thing is trading stuff like that. I guess I should say i don't know what your average joe does for cash. well, it's noted early on in Basilisk Station that Manticore is the main warehousing and transshipping hub for the huge amount of traffic that passes through the Junction so you can expect that common civilian jobs would include things like Space Longshoreman, Space Stevedore, inventory, various other shipping support industries both planet-side and orbital being a major trade hub they presumably have a stock exchange, so you'd have your day traders and futures hawkers and assorted other finance pukes, with their own support industries the Manticore system seems to be self-sufficient on basic commodities, so you'd have your regular allotment of agriculture, extraction, and service sector jobs, plus probably plenty of lighter manufacturing on top of the orbital shipbuilding and mining what i'm saying is i think you're maybe over-thinking and exoticizing this. We can probably assume Manticore's peacetime private sector economy looks pretty much like an idealized version of America's, with the dominant shipping advantage of the Junction taking the place of our own violent crypto-imperialist hegemony in ensuring favorable trade balance like, Landing is probably a wild scene, but the life of your average suburban accountant from Midsized Gryphon City probably looks about the same as the life of the average suburban accountant in from Ohio, only the guy on Gryphon takes a trans-orbital cutter when he goes on vacation rather than flying Delta
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Apr 19, 2020 13:02
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FuturePastNow posted:Manticore also sells ships; what do they do when they commission a new class of destroyer or cruiser that obsoletes an older class? They sell the old ships to one of their friendly neighbors. Does Weber seriously write this? 
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Apr 19, 2020 14:35
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*Cough*PupsOfWar posted:Aug 16, 2019 19:46 Double *Cough* *cough* quantumfoam posted:Jan 29, 2020 22:59 Each Honor Harrington book is a scenario from the mil-scifi wargame Starfire that David Weber worked on. Manticore + Honor Harrington are able to carry over their fleets/tech/experience over to the next scenario and have access to newer Starfire edition rulesets, while the opposing forces are stuck with the default Starfire ruleset.
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Apr 19, 2020 16:22
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In Chapter Ten of Mission of Honor: Retold, we finally get some naval shooting and a look at the Solarian League Navy's upgraded hardware. The missile accounting will continue.
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Apr 19, 2020 17:07
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General Battuta posted:In Chapter Ten of Mission of Honor: Retold, we finally get some naval shooting and a look at the Solarian League Navy's upgraded hardware. The missile accounting will continue. That's good stuff. You've packed more tension and uncertainty into this one fleet action that Weber has in the last twenty books, and with more characterization for the opposition than in the same run.
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Apr 19, 2020 20:06
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PupsOfWar posted:what i'm saying is i think you're maybe over-thinking and exoticizing this. We can probably assume Manticore's peacetime private sector economy looks pretty much like an idealized version of America's, with the dominant shipping advantage of the Junction taking the place of our own violent crypto-imperialist hegemony in ensuring favorable trade balance Sir, this is a Let's Read. OF course I'm analyzing this to hell. But the thing is, this is never really spoken of or hinted at. The mention of Manticore being the warehouse capital of the galaxy has a problem is that Manticore is regarded as the X capital of the galaxy for way too many things. Manticore does not have a large population and it's been in the middle of a war in Silesia like a century against pirates, and by the time of the second book is kicking off a multi-decade high-intensity war. Their population has to be strained in so many roles worse than Grayson's will be very soon. There is a reason why I complain that I want to see the human side of the war. It's bad writing if I have to go "Oh, well, I guess that despite the extreme situation that Manticore is in and has been in and WILL be in, that the situation back home is Generic America Except Also Everyone Is Apparently A Millionaire". quantumfoam posted:Each Honor Harrington book is a scenario from the mil-scifi wargame Starfire that David Weber worked on. Honestly wouldn't surprise me at this rate.
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Apr 19, 2020 20:07
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General Battuta posted:In Chapter Ten of Mission of Honor: Retold, we finally get some naval shooting and a look at the Solarian League Navy's upgraded hardware. This continues to be excellently done! I loved the absurd plausibility of the software crash. General Battuta posted:The missile accounting will continue.
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Apr 19, 2020 20:30
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Safety Biscuits posted:Does Weber seriously write this? Grayson is flying a bunch of old Manticoran ships until they build their own. Same for the other allies we barely see because they don't do much, like Zanzibar.
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Apr 19, 2020 21:15
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