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I read the last couple pages completely loving confused and then I realized "oh, idiot, the new book came out last month."  I just wanted to say that this: quote:Marko is the bad guy. In the last book, he destroyed the Earth and killed 15,000,000,000 human beings. In this book, he is the world's least competent military commander and basically just an insecure, loser ex-boyfriend. He doesn't have a single tactical insight, he has literally no strategy, he loses every single engagement, he spends quite a lot of time hiding out in his cabin because he can't deal with his own failures, and in the climactic final battle scene he is defeated without firing a shot. (Turns out he was a puppet, more or less, of someone who is actually a credible threat, but they barely show up at all in this book; not even enough for decent foreshadowing.) Isn't really out of character though? As far as I can remember his best tactics just revolve around having a ton of back up plans. He has no real experience leading soldiers or coordinating ships outside of relatively petty terrorist operations. The asteroid thing working as planned was dumb blind luck helped out by events completely out of his control. He hit the lotto and then thought that made him the next Alexander but he obv is not. I dunno I never thought he was some genius to begin with and the fact that there's someone else behind him seems like it shouldn't be a surprise whatsoever. I would say it was foreshadowed ever since Nemesis Games but that's too weak a word almost considering he didn't just magick himself up some Mars Navy ships or somehow get all kinds of intelligence and logistical support just from his own lovely terror cell people. Obviously there was a powerful backer. As to whether the book suffers for having a weak antagonist I guess I'll find out this weekend; I hope people are overblowing the criticism a bit though because I really enjoyed all the previous books. gohmak posted:Another novel that has the theme of Earths destruction being the catalyst for humanity populating the stars is Dan Simons Hyperion. Hyperion is good. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Jan 6, 2017 |
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Jan 6, 2017 21:20
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K I'm at the last chapter and I gotta say idk what people mean when they are confused by the Belters suddenly being super good at fighting. There's one mention of a bigger fleet combat in/around Jupiter, and the MCRN is fighting alongside Pa's belter ships against the Free Navy which has stolen MCRN ships that may or may not be upgraded with Laconia tech. The Free Navy also outnumbers them 2 to 1 iirc? Plus I'm sure they got some training from the Laconia dudes. In all other combat mentioned, the Belters kind of suck at it. Esp the 3 to 1 against the Rocinante where they are spraying their PD fire uselessly because they are hella out of range. Then everyone accepts Marco's poo poo talking of Filip for 'bad shooting' even though on a real military ship anyone would have known that the PDs were nowhere near effective range and Marco was being 100% a douche. And it's true that the Pella's pilot is the one that juked predictably over and over such that Bobby could get them to juke into incoming PD fire. That's just scrub tier combat piloting imo. It's just like basic that you don't do the same thing a few times in combat because you get predictable - poke your head out of the same spot from cover a couple times and the third time it'll get blown off. Then the only reason their poo poo survived was because Holden disarmed the torpedos. The belters are obv not that good at combat (assuming Marco kept the best crew on his flagship) and rely on ambush + quick run tactics. Platystemon posted:Belters don’t actually engage in many fleet actions, though. Yeah their whole thing seems to have been hit and fade tactics. Collateral posted:The Free Navy have maybe two dozen MCRN corvettes? The UN Navy and the 2/3 of the MCRN that is left can't match that? Protecting Earth + Mars from asteroids and also conducting a massive system-wide assault? There's dozens of stations out there at least. We only got to see details from Jupiter; for all we know 2 MCRN corvettes roflstomped 10 Belter ships elsewhere. Toast Museum posted:I also still have a hard time buying that some shady admiral could make off with two thirds of the navy. For that matter, what happened to the Martian crews of the ships that wound up being sold to the Free Navy? Did Duarte and/or Marco manage to kill off a huge chunk of the MCRN without anyone noticing? Did Duarte somehow build half a navy's worth of ships off the books? Was it really 2/3rds though? More like 1/3rd at most iirc? Also you should take a look at what happened to the USSR's military in the midst of their collapse; 'Lord of War' wasn't really exaggerating if you've seen that movie. Mars4523 posted:On the other hand, we can see what can be accomplished by naval gunners trained to the level of proficiency that Bobbie, a Martian marine, has. And she basically accomplishes trick shots with naval guns. Worth noting that the railgun was an aftermarket addition; if the Rocinante was still a stock MCRN ship she wouldn't have been able to do that. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Jan 10, 2017 |
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Jan 10, 2017 18:58
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Toast Museum posted:It still doesn't make a ton of sense that Mars is immediately a failed state Yeah fair enough though; and you'd think 300 years in the future or whatever they'd have some better ways to keep track of their supplies let alone entire warships.
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Jan 10, 2017 19:11
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Throwing rocks is kind of a big deal and if you let them sit there and do it forever eventually you're gonna miss one. They also need to get food/water/resources from the belt + the outer planets because Earth is hosed now. Also I think there's a lot more ships floating around than you guys realize even if most are not mentioned by name. I'm not about to trawl back through the text but Michio Pa is def in command of more than 2 ships and there are dozens of contested stations not mentioned by name (it says so near the end I just read that line) in play. There's prolly a bunch of pirate rear end Belter ships that weren't MCRN property to begin with too. ZombieLenin posted:The part that doesn't feel right is the free navy actually being able to put up any coordinated and well executed fleet action against a navy of either Mars or Earth, no matter how many Martian ships they had. I don't remember this happening? There's the battle near Jupiter but it didn't really say that the Belters won decisively or anything... I don't really remember the Belt even winning that, just Pa lamenting some deaths on her end and wondering if she could have done something different. What coordinated and well executed fleet action are we talking about? Retreating from Ceres? e: It's important to remember that the Mars/Earth navy commanders don't have the information we do either. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Jan 10, 2017 |
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Jan 10, 2017 22:00
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