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Deptfordx posted:
we do have an example of exactly that thing happening in honorverse - the Manticorans' late-war battlecruisers are the size of pre-war Havenite battleships, but there is apparently no thought given to re-classifying them, because the classification is based on their fleet role of "fast raiding capital ship" rather than on tonnage
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Apr 21, 2020 12:25
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That's not unheard of in real life navies either. E.g. the newest Norwegian frigate class is really a small destroyer (5500 tons, good AAW/ASW capacities, ok ASuW capability), but we still classify it as a frigate. Same thing is also happening in other navies, where you have 2-3000 ton corvettes etc. The most glaring is the japanese pocket carriers that are designated "helicopter destroyers", though that's related to their constitutional arms limits.
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Apr 21, 2020 13:02
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well, since the U.S. navy streamlined their classification system in the 70s we don't even operate w/ the same nouns as everyone else america's frigates didn't go away, we just started calling em destroyers PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 13:18 on Apr 21, 2020 |
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Apr 21, 2020 13:15
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PupsOfWar posted:well, since the U.S. navy streamlined their classification system in the 70s we don't even operate w/ the same nouns as everyone else IIRC It's actually the other way round. Before the ship reclassification in 1975, your frigates were referred to as DE or DEG, after 1975 they were referred to as FF or FFG. The USN decommissioned their last Perry class FFG's in 2015. E: I can't read dates. Wibla fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Apr 21, 2020 |
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Apr 21, 2020 16:56
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The weird thing is that basically everyone operates on the same ship classes with absolutely no differences.Deptfordx posted:I don't think that's a thing in the Honorverse though. Honestly they do keep calling them the same when they get really huge but it's pretty much always done to show that the others are losers because their ships aren't as good because size = power in the Honorverse basically. Also Saganami Island Tactical Simulator, from what I have heard, is basically a good game to play if you can't sleep. It's basically just Starfire except with even more tedious number crunching.
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Apr 21, 2020 17:47
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Deptfordx posted:Edit: Unrelated. Did anybody actually ever try Saganami Island Tactical Simulator. I was always mildly curious how that played. Yeah, I write for the developer, Ken Burnside. There were two editions to it, the second one streamlined a bunch of really tedious missile accounting and a few other things. 2E Saganami Island had good rules throughout, unfortunately it was a faithful simulation of Honorverse tactical combat. That means the only viable tactic is stacking all your ships in one big stack so they can concentrate antimissile defenses. It's great at playing that kind of game, unfortunately that kind of game is boring. It's great for flipping through books of SSDs and seeing what the ships could 'really' do, but actually playing it is an exercise in two stacks spamming missiles at each other. Ken took some lessons learned from SITS into the Squadron Strike project, which turned out to be a very playable game with good reasons to maneuver and to not stack all your ships in one hex (and altitude level !). I'm currently in development on my second Traveller fleetbook; the first one covered the Fifth Frontier War, and the second will be the Solomani RIm War, plus some trouble with opportunistic Aslan clans. There's a small but active contingent playing Squadron Strike online through a customer Virtual Tabletop app. Come blow up starships with us !
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Apr 21, 2020 18:11
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What kind of changes did you make for Squadron Strike? I'm always curious about anti-blobbing mechanics.
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Apr 21, 2020 18:49
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General Battuta posted:What kind of changes did you make for Squadron Strike? I'm always curious about anti-blobbing mechanics. Tough question ! For one, Ken made facing matter in ways that it doesn't in SITS. A divided force isn't begging to be wiped out in detail, so splitting to hit enemies from multiple directions is a thing that can work. There also some weapon traits that affect a whole hex; I'm not using any in SS:Traveller, but they come up in the roll-your-own campaigns. You especially don't want to be down-range from a Wave Motion Gun and all blobbed up.
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Apr 21, 2020 19:08
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Gnoman posted:It is unreasonable to construct a narrow continuity to make Weber’s writing "uncomfortably antisemitic" in the first place. The Masadans are an offshoot of a Christian offshoot. The original Christian offshoot is the followers of a Prophet from the Midwestern United States who added a Third Testament to the Bible. How blunt does the allegory have to be for it to be obviously a Mormon context? Where is the slightest shred of evidence that they are anything else? The passage that started this whole quote chain is evidence. As is the Masadan’s being named after a Jewish revolution/sect. Grayson drapes itself in Americana and are obviously supposed to be Mormons in space. The Masadans are evil wife beating Jewish terrorists; did your schismatic Mormons reject the New Testament? Invoking something that has been used as an excuse for religious persecution of Jews and then turning around and claiming that you are writing about some barely known Mormon offshoot cults is laughable.
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Apr 21, 2020 19:28
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Kchama posted:The weird thing is that basically everyone operates on the same ship classes with absolutely no differences. I've played an entire large fleet action in Star Fleet Battles*, I laugh at your tedious number crunching. *Not really. We played for 10 hours and we were still barely into the third turn. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Apr 21, 2020 |
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Apr 21, 2020 23:21
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PupsOfWar posted:i can't think of any other big mil-SF where the x-ray laser missile is used either, come to think of it Yeah, it was part of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (aka "Star Wars"). The idea is that the prompt radiation from a nuclear explosion (either neutrons or gammas, I don't know which) hits a lasing medium (made of some classified material, but probably metal or a metal-doped glass) and in the microseconds before it's vapourised generates enough of a population inversion that it can lase x-rays. (Though technically it would not actually be a laser, just a superfluorescent ASE source, unless some really heavily-classified x-ray mirror exists). I believe Edward Teller was a big promoter of the idea, and rather oversold it to Reagan. They did actually try it, in underground nuclear testing, but supposedly it either didn't work or didn't work well enough to be worth pursuing. As for other mil-SF, I know the idea appears in the final battle in Niven & Pournelle's Footfall though there rather logically it's an Orion-drive ship launching the bomb-pumped lasers. General Battuta posted:As I'm closing in on the end of Mission of Honor Retold I really enjoyed this. More exciting than Weber's version by far. Recognizably the same characters, but with something approaching real motivations rather than "I'm the bad guy, I do the bad things". You could write a numbers-filed-off mil-SF series set in the fractious successor states of the
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Apr 21, 2020 23:25
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If I remember correctly isn't General Battuta actually our thread published author. Writes the well received Baru Comorant series https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seth-Dickinson/e/B00IYKOYNC?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_3&qid=1587508502&sr=8-3
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Apr 21, 2020 23:37
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battuta pulling the powerful Pro Author flex move of uploading a chapter every day w/ no visible beta process akulanization posted:The passage that started this whole quote chain is evidence. As is the Masadan’s being named after a Jewish revolution/sect. Grayson drapes itself in Americana and are obviously supposed to be Mormons in space. The Masadans are evil wife beating Jewish terrorists; did your schismatic Mormons reject the New Testament? Invoking something that has been used as an excuse for religious persecution of Jews and then turning around and claiming that you are writing about some barely known Mormon offshoot cults is laughable. I've always assumed the Masadans, despite the jewish iconography, are an islamophobia thing but its possible i just always assume that whenever i see those tropes appearing in american or british genre fiction from the 90s and 00s i have no actual basis for thinking weber is an islamophobe, particularly in comparison to his fellow Baen authors PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Apr 21, 2020 |
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Apr 21, 2020 23:44
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mllaneza posted:Yeah, I write for the developer, Ken Burnside. There were two editions to it, the second one streamlined a bunch of really tedious missile accounting and a few other things. 2E Saganami Island had good rules throughout, unfortunately it was a faithful simulation of Honorverse tactical combat. That means the only viable tactic is stacking all your ships in one big stack so they can concentrate antimissile defenses. It's great at playing that kind of game, unfortunately that kind of game is boring. It's great for flipping through books of SSDs and seeing what the ships could 'really' do, but actually playing it is an exercise in two stacks spamming missiles at each other. I enjoyed playing it just because it was the first time I'd ever played something with actual Newtonian thrust and movement. I disagree slightly about good rules and faithful simulation - the worst part of the game are the 2d10- rolls for damage and the 50/50 die roll to not blow up on certain SI hits which result in games with small numbers of units coming down to luck and don't really simulate anything from the books. I found that playing with all 2d10- rolls having their values halved and treating any SI boxes with a value of 7 or lower as blank made for interesting and compelling 1v1/1v2/2v2 games that usually came down to being a better shiphandler (Also the point balancing was hilariously awful but that could be compensated for with experience). I certainly agree that playing with any more ships on a side than that was tactically boring and should never be done but I got enough enjoyment out of flying Newtonian ships in one on one combat that I felt it was a worthwhile experience. EDIT: And based on the most recent chapter, I see Battuta is really taking the thread title to heart. blackmongoose fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 21, 2020 23:57
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mllaneza posted:It's great for flipping through books of SSDs and seeing what the ships could 'really' do, but actually playing it is an exercise in two stacks spamming missiles at each other. I seem to remember reading that the actual ship descriptions aren't accurate to the book, because the ship descriptions weren't consistent. Like he'd describe a ship as under-armed for its class but then when you count up its armaments and compare it to others in its class you'd find that they actually a lot better armed than others in its class. PupsOfWar posted:battuta pulling the powerful Pro Author flex move of uploading a chapter every day w/ no visible beta process I was basically torn between Jewish and Islamophobia with Masadans, but it was my Jewish friend that helped me peg it as more Jewish. Kchama fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 00:09
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PupsOfWar posted:I've always assumed the Masadans, despite the jewish iconography, are an islamophobia thing I think that they are a somewhat ambiguous Semitic cypher if only because the book was published in 1993. I think the textual evidence points to a Jewish point of reference; but in the post 9/11 zeitgeist a reading of Masada as Islam inspired is going to occur to most people first.
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Apr 22, 2020 00:53
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akulanization posted:I think that they are a somewhat ambiguous Semitic cypher if only because the book was published in 1993. I think the textual evidence points to a Jewish point of reference; but in the post 9/11 zeitgeist a reading of Masada as Islam inspired is going to occur to most people first. I didn't read the series until well post 9/11, so I definitely noticed the fundamental Islamic connection, particularly with the focus on oppressed women and insular thinking. Then again, not much visible Judaism where I grew up. I'd take it as a combination, just like how the Graysons are Japanese Mormons, or Haven is socialist French.
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Apr 22, 2020 01:00
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Fell Fire posted:I didn't read the series until well post 9/11, so I definitely noticed the fundamental Islamic connection, particularly with the focus on oppressed women and insular thinking. Then again, not much visible Judaism where I grew up. I'd take it as a combination, just like how the Graysons are Japanese Mormons, or Haven is socialist French. Soviet France, Comrade.
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Apr 22, 2020 01:06
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Maybe I'm the only one who saw more than a little of the Branch Davidians in Masada.
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Apr 22, 2020 02:13
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The Branch Davidians are best known for Waco in '93, which post-dates this book. It's possible Weber was aware of them specifically or or of that sort of movement in general, but it would be a stretch.
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Apr 22, 2020 02:22
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anyone ever read any good WW3 scenarios that don't involve either NATO vs. Soviet Bloc or the rehash that is NATO vs. China? thinking a few days ago about WW3 in Star Trek and the Honorverse reminded me of george friedman's bad nonfiction book wherein he forecast global war against the sinister duumvirate of Japan and Turkey what other Weird War 3s yall got?
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Apr 22, 2020 07:03
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I have fascist USA fighting the British Empire.
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Apr 22, 2020 07:10
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wasn't the thing you're reading written pre-ww2 though surely the hypothetical war depicted in it would itself be an alternate ww2, not 3
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Apr 22, 2020 07:17
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poo poo, you're right, the book is from 1921, so no WWIII, ha ha 
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Apr 22, 2020 07:27
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Simon Winchester's book Pacific Nightmare isn't good, but it starts with internal unrest in China related to the handover of Hong Kong, which leads to a Japanese invasion.
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Apr 22, 2020 07:58
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PupsOfWar posted:anyone ever read any good WW3 scenarios that don't involve either NATO vs. Soviet Bloc or the rehash that is NATO vs. China? Joe Buff has a series about a submarine in WW3 where (IIRC) Boer revanchists and German neo-Nazis take over their respective governments and start throwing around Russian-supplied tactical nukes and blow up a big NATO convoy and Warsaw to keep everybody else from doing anything about it. I haven't read it and have no idea if it's any good but it sounds pretty wild from what I've read about it, nukes being set off everywhere, the protagonist submarine has a ceramic hull, Cuba and Venezuela are US allies. IIRC there was a goon who wrote a scifi novel about a war on a space colony with cold war level tech. Called Neo Persia or something like that. Larry Bond's Shattered Trident is about China vs a Japan-Vietnam-Korea-Taiwan-India alliance in a sea/conventional IRBM war with the US trying to play peacekeeper and the protagonist captain eventually going up against a Indian Akula-class. It was okay, haven't read anything else in the series. One of the Command: Modern Operations developers has a blog with WW3 fiction reviews, might be some stuff there: https://fuldapocalypsefiction.com/ On his gamedev blog he posted 5 of the most unusual plots: quote:Dark Rose by Mike Lunnon-Wood. A Libyan/Palestinian alliance invades and conquers Ireland to serve as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Israel, and the resistance to them includes a revived High Queen of Tara.
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Apr 22, 2020 10:16
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C.M. Kruger posted:Dark Rose by Mike Lunnon-Wood. A Libyan/Palestinian alliance invades and conquers Ireland to serve as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Israel, and the resistance to them includes a revived High Queen of Tara. That sort of reminds me of this cartoon: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=364
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Apr 22, 2020 14:11
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Dark Rose posted:A consortium of oil-rich Arab nations, secretly gaining control of the mortgage and property companies, the banks and major businesses, buy Ireland. The idea is to blackmail the US to get the Israelis out of Palestine. how different would the global landscape look if pan-arab unity were the powerful and enduring force that American military thriller writers imagine it to be
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Apr 22, 2020 18:33
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C.M. Kruger posted:Larry Bond's Shattered Trident is about China vs a Japan-Vietnam-Korea-Taiwan-India alliance in a sea/conventional IRBM war with the US trying to play peacekeeper and the protagonist captain eventually going up against a Indian Akula-class. It was okay, haven't read anything else in the series. If you're willing to count Larry Bond as "good", there's also his book Cauldron, which is one of three "Red Storm Rising clones" he published after finishing his collaboration on RSR with Clancy. The plot features a then-future late 90s where the EU collapsed, NATO died, and the world is mired in a recession caused by a global trade war. The primary conflict involves France and Germany using post-Soviet states in Eastern Europe (Hungary being the most important) for a form of economic colonialism. The book opens with a false-flag terrorist bombing at a French-owned manufacturing plant in Hungary, which was performed to manufacture an excuse to exclude Hungarian workers and replace them with forcibly-departed immigrant workers (mostly Muslim) that were no longer wanted. This leads to a coup against the Hungarian government that repudiates the existing business arrangements, and eventually to the French and Germans being in open warfare against a US-UK-Poland-Hungary alliance. Unfortunately, much more work was put into devising the scenario than to the writing of the book itself. If you've read Red Storm Rising, or either of the sister books Vortex (South Africa's de-apartheid campaign fails, and War Ensues) and Red Phoenix (Kim Jong-Il is not confident he will smoothly succeed to his father's throne, and War Ensues), then you've read Cauldron. The formula's pretty similar, and several scenes read as if somebody used a Mad Libs card to write for all four books.
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Apr 22, 2020 18:54
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Gnoman posted:If you're willing to count Larry Bond as "good", there's also his book Cauldron, which is one of three "Red Storm Rising clones" he published after finishing his collaboration on RSR with Clancy. The plot features a then-future late 90s where the EU collapsed, NATO died, and the world is mired in a recession caused by a global trade war. The primary conflict involves France and Germany using post-Soviet states in Eastern Europe (Hungary being the most important) for a form of economic colonialism. The book opens with a false-flag terrorist bombing at a French-owned manufacturing plant in Hungary, which was performed to manufacture an excuse to exclude Hungarian workers and replace them with forcibly-departed immigrant workers (mostly Muslim) that were no longer wanted. This leads to a coup against the Hungarian government that repudiates the existing business arrangements, and eventually to the French and Germans being in open warfare against a US-UK-Poland-Hungary alliance. Vortex would be a much better book if the US was not part of it. Let Cuba kill the racists.
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Apr 22, 2020 19:22
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Deptfordx posted:I've played an entire large fleet action in Star Fleet Battles*, I laugh at your tedious number crunching. I've played SFB, it's got considerably more maneuver and tactics than SITS had.
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Apr 22, 2020 21:06
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In the brief moments between Energy Allocation, counting off impulses and rolling 2d6 on the damage allocation chart 100 times to resolve an attack. It's not that it's not playable if you're fighting a single ship action, or 2 or 3 small ships per side, but a a fleet action is an exercise in madness. Especially if you're additionally crazy enough to play one or both sides using factions that are fighter and drone (which are missiles in SFB) heavy. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 22:25
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perhaps instead of using any of these purpose-built systems, I should just game out all of my mass space-battle scenarios using GURPS: Vehicles
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Apr 22, 2020 23:58
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PupsOfWar posted:perhaps instead of using any of these purpose-built systems, I should just game out all of my mass space-battle scenarios using GURPS: Vehicles It's weird how all the purpose-built systems fail at their purpose of having mass space-battles while still being fun. Unless they forgot the 'fun' part of the purpose.
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Apr 23, 2020 00:59
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Star Fleet Battles is super-detailed because it was meant for combat between individual ships, or half a dozen total. It bogs down in mass space combat because it wasn't designed for that, and thus scales badly.
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Apr 23, 2020 01:39
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Gnoman posted:Star Fleet Battles is super-detailed because it was meant for combat between individual ships, or half a dozen total. It bogs down in mass space combat because it wasn't designed for that, and thus scales badly. Yeah but SITS is purpose-built for Honorverse which is about mass space combat, and it is super tedious itself.
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Apr 23, 2020 02:27
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Kchama posted:Yeah but SITS is purpose-built for Honorverse which is about mass space combat, and it is super tedious itself. Judging from the battles in the books, Honorverse is actually about one-sided massacres due to strategic surprises so any faithful game should have one person set up their units and then the other one gets to put whatever ships they want in whatever positions they want and then declare victory.
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Apr 23, 2020 06:17
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i assume saganami island tactical simulator represents Apollo missiles thru the mechanic of "stand in the next room and throw a baseball at the board"
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Apr 23, 2020 13:00
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so, uh, I started reading Richard Fox. I read the first book in The Ember War series, deleted it in disgust at the whole "The West was unified after America led a crusade to liberate sweden from Sharia law", then read the Terran Armor Corps books, and decided to reluctantly give the first two books in The Ember War franchise a try again. It was only able to be read when I realized that this is just a Milscifi book from a Weeb's perspective, including the conversation in book one between a mecha pilot and NOT COMMANDER SHEPHERD i mean NATHAN HALE (holy poo poo that is a generic name) about Evangelion and Hideaki Anno. The Terran armor Corps books are much better, if only because it reads like Catholic Space Halo where the true heroes are Basque Neo Zeon who worship Haman Kharn as a Saint. Edit: I'm not even kidding on that last part. After gaining control of an Ancient Progenitor- I MEAN KHARESH Artificat (and in the process pissing off a previously unknown faction of Space Ghosts who worshiped its owner, Malal), she uses it to drop a comet on the not!Citadel Council's new meeting place with a message of "All Aliens leave humanity alone or I'm dropping comets on all your planets." Fivemarks fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 18:10
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Let‘s Read German SF: Now Playing: The Power of the Three The Power of the Three continues to be wild, and as appropriate for this thread, it‘s mostly about war and planning to go to war. Thanks to the trains between my work place and home being wonkier then usual, I managed to get a good chunk of the book done today, so let me tell you what happened so far: President-Dictator of the American Union, Cyrus Stonard, plans to crush the British Empire once and for all and has already positioned his fleets of submarines and air cruisers for the Blitzkrieg he has in mind. But Dr. Glossin, a sociopath and serialkiller with mind control powers, convinces the dictator to wait because he fears some old enemies of his may have supplied the British with a secret super-weapon. So he travels to the UK to do some spying. Meanwhile, the protagonists (Logg Sar, who is Half-German/Half-Kurd, Atma, an Indian who hates the British and also has mind control powers and Eric, a Swede) managed to escape from the AU and landed in Sweden. There they start building a devastating super-weapon in a secret Swedish lab. They can do this because Eric is the heir of an ancient Swedish noble family and is filthy rich. Then we learn from a Weber-eske meeting between British high-ranking military and political officials what is happening on the other side: The British already know about President-Dictator Stonards war plans, especially about the secret air fleet armed with bioweapons, meant to destroy the British population. The Royal Airforce has a counter-strike prepared, but everyone is sure at least some of the American air cruisers will break through, unloading weaponized plague and cholera on the UK. To counter this, these sacks of poo poo plan to let some of the disease „accidentally“ spread to Europe, to cause the European nations to enter the war on the British side. To push this strategy, a massive propaganda campaign is planned and set in motion. We also learn some history: After WWI, the British Empire took over Constantinople, pushed every single other nation out of Africa to take over all their colonies and then engineered a war between Japan and the USA, which the US then lost. This caused a socialist uprising in the US, which was bloodily defeated by warlord Stonard, who then had to turn around and fight a second war against Japan. The US won this war, but the damage was so great Stonard turned the USA into the fascist American Union after the victory. In the following years, British infamy slowly crept up on them: The AU slowly managed to draw both Canada and Australia into closer and closer ties and now they‘re only one step away from severing their ties with Britain and joining the AU. Japan was so weakened by the war they can‘t play the role of a political counter-weight anymore. Meanwhile, on the continent German, France and Russia were slowly pushed by British arrogance and hostility into some sort of European Union. They secretly plan to gently caress over both war parties by heavily profiting from selling materials and other goods to both of them at 300% markup (that‘s what they want to start at, mind you) Then Atma, Logg Sar‘s friend, brainwashes him to prevent him from rushing off to save his fiance, because he just learned that Dr. Glossin captured and brainwashed her. Also we learn at some point that Dr. Glossin regularly beats his old, ugly black servant, because brainwashing, raping and murdering women is just not evil enough for that guy. Coincidentally, this scene also reveals that Hans Dominik has probably never even seen a non-white person for his entire life. I‘m now at the point where Dr. Glossin is arguing with President-Dictator Stonard about the war. President-Dictator Stonard gets angrier and angrier because he is told that maybe, just maybe, some weird randos could maybe have the secret super-weapon and theoretically help out the British. Even though his lead in Britain turned out to be a whole load of nothing, he still has this hunch, you see… Stonard really wants to start killing British though, but Dr. Glossin can convince him to wait at least until the secret American underwater-base at the east-coast of Africa is finished. Meanwhile, Atma and Logg Sar finally travel to the AU to save the girl, while Eric gets tempted to use the super-weapon for his own ends, but (barely) resists. If you guys want to know more, I‘ll keep reading! Libluini fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 19:17
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