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Omi no Kami posted:Huh, thanks for the summaries guys- I definitely made a good call bailing out when I did. The books he did with Flint were completely drat awful, though, just in different ways. Like, ridiculously even more sexist than Weber can be. Also it has the worst cover in history. The titular Wages Of Sin is a space station shaped like a giant woman apparently and the dick-ships dock by flying into its mouth. Also man spot the foreshadowing with the name that no one would ever choose!!!!!! EDIT: 
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Aug 12, 2019 03:14
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Omi no Kami posted:Huh, thanks for the summaries guys- I definitely made a good call bailing out when I did. This is why I actually like In Death Ground and The Shiva Option, because they're not in the Honorverse and Steve White, Weber's co-author for those books, does a decent job of keeping Weber on task. The rest of the Starfire books are only fair to middling, and alas when White inherited the series after Weber left they fell right off a cliff. But for a couple of books there? It was pretty good. jng2058 fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Aug 12, 2019 |
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Aug 12, 2019 03:19
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...so holy freaking crap, that cover is terrible in the worst way. And yeah, the book itself was terrible, it was just very non-Weber. Like, I'd call it bad in a John Ringo way (e.g. horrifying but readable) instead of "Let's regularly bring the plot to a screeching halt for 40 pages so the author can give us a creed about their favorite sociological/economic/political theory of the day, then tell us about the serial numbers on the new missile pods." Also, I genuinely forget: was the planet of space neanderthals whose culture revolved entirely around violent rape something floating around in Weber's back-catalog, or can we thank/blame Flint for that particularly horrifying innovation?
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Aug 12, 2019 03:20
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Omi no Kami posted:Also, I genuinely forget: was the planet of space neanderthals whose culture revolved entirely around violent rape something floating around in Weber's back-catalog, or can we thank/blame Flint for that particularly horrifying innovation? Weber. They're introduced in the second book as the archenemies of the Noble Space Mormon Samurai.
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Aug 12, 2019 03:48
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Omi no Kami posted:...so holy freaking crap, that cover is terrible in the worst way. Maybe we should just have Great Evil Lizard do the sidebooks, thinking about it. Especially since they have wayyy too much to do with the Masadans, who suck. And yeah as stated, are a Weber invention. Flint doesn't make it better, though.
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Aug 12, 2019 04:56
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Khizan posted:Weber. They're introduced in the second book as the archenemies of the Noble Space Mormon Samurai. ...wait, those are the guys the space mormons are at war with? I somehow managed to miss that when I read the early books. Man, those books are crazy.
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Aug 12, 2019 05:00
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Omi no Kami posted:...wait, those are the guys the space mormons are at war with? I somehow managed to miss that when I read the early books. Man, those books are crazy. Yep! It sure was those guys. They're pretty much the Designated Bad Guys of the setting, until Mesa really gets going.
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Aug 12, 2019 05:16
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Wait are the masadans literally Neanderthals
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Aug 12, 2019 05:18
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jng2058 posted:This is why I actually like In Death Ground and The Shiva Option, because they're not in the Honorverse and Steve White, Weber's co-author for those books, does a decent job of keeping Weber on task. Crusade was actually my first Weber novel, followed by In Death Ground and The Shiva Option, then I read Apocalypse Troll and the Dahak novels. So I read more or less all of Weber's non-Honor Harrington sci-fi before the series he's probably best known for. At least I had a good idea what I was getting into. I did really like the unintentional comedy bit in the newest Harrington novel when the rogue Solarian intelligence officers discover that Mesan agents who've infiltrated their navy all have nanotech that will kill them instantly when they're discovered, and they root out the enemy agents by inviting high-ranking officers into meetings, pretending to arrest them, and seeing which ones drop dead
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Aug 12, 2019 05:31
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shovelbum posted:Wait are the masadans literally Neanderthals Nah. they're Ex-NotMormon Not-Muslims luddites.
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Aug 12, 2019 06:00
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Kchama posted:Nah. they're Ex-NotMormon Not-Muslims luddites. ...aren't they also impossibly heavily augmented with genetic engineering and body modifications? Or are they just supposed to be naturally tough from growing up on a high-gravity world? I think I pictured them as neanderthals because whats-her-face the marine lady from Casinos Of Creative Bankruptcy came from the same place and kept doing absurd nonsense that required immense amounts of physical strength. So I just pictured everyone from that world as a giant, stupidly musclebound weirdo with no neck and lots of grunting. Wait, I think she's actually from somewhere different, but she has a squad of amazons from the same planet who *do* kinda talk in caveman talk? God, I'd forgotten how silly these got.
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Aug 12, 2019 07:13
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i think you two are getting masadans (the graysons' religious enemies who have no special physical properties) mixed up with scrags (the descendents of genetically-enhanced supersoldiers manufactured by pan-slavic nationalists long ago) which is fair since the masadans and scrags were working together (both under pay of the Mesan slavers) during those spinoffs Omi no Kami posted:
thandi palane recruited a squad of female scrags (survivors of the Mesa-employed scrag hit squad) in the first of the spinoff books, who then followed her through the remainder of the spinoff series. The broken english is how the authors chose to render the thick slavic accents all scrags supposedly have. the conceit is that scrags obey crude pack dynamics (you know, virgin/chad meme stuff) so the female scrags were willing to follow palane because she was cooler, hotter and buffer than them. its dumb basically eric flint wanted to write an all-female commando babe squad and scrags were the premise that allowed this PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Aug 12, 2019 |
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Aug 12, 2019 07:32
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After reading this thread, I have a question: Why do you keep reading HH books? My encounter with them went something like * I want SciFi with different take on space combat than park in visual range and complain about shields failing * Everyone recommends HH, let's read book 1 -- it is not good, but different * Let's read book 2 -- huh, I swear I've read this book already * Let's try book 3 -- did not finish And then completely forgot about it being a thing until this thread. On the other hand, thanks for the Black Company recommendation, I'll be checking my library tomorrow. 
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Aug 12, 2019 07:49
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mostly because theres so little space ship shoot books that arent equally horrible. it's down to the point where I'd say the slice of life series 'x on union station' might be the greatest active sci fi work of all time due to having zero fetish content of a sexual or ordnance or sexual ordnance nature, while also not consisting of the written equivalent of desert sand baked extra dry. i can only reread ian banks and the radch novels and barrayar so many times you know
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Aug 12, 2019 09:41
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Also, because we make bad decisions.
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Aug 12, 2019 09:49
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Xarn posted:After reading this thread, I have a question: Why do you keep reading HH books? My encounter with them went something like Hello 1st post in this thread friend. Re-read the OP, and more specifically the first re-quoted text in the OP. That is how 70% or more of the thread initially got suckered into reading Weber's HH books. The allure of FREE BOOK + FREE BOOK IS ABOUT SPACE COMBAT cannot be underestimated in the pre-teen/teenager mind. Would rate the actual space combat in the HH series on the low end of scifi/mil-scifi space combat stories. Highest end of the scale being Iain Bank's millisecond's duration space combat, lowest end of the scale being the infinitely stupid "cannonball broadsides IN SPACE" from Harry Harrison's {i]Starworld[/i] novel and the entirety of Doc EE Smith's stories. Would rank Alastair Reynolds space-combat "endurance strategy/counter strategy" in his Relevation Space series in the upper end of the scale, and would toss Frederic Brown's ARENA as the neutral (5.0) baseline.....(ARENA had a perfect setup of space combat story, morphed into something completely different while still involving a life vs death alien vs alien fight then morphed back into a space combat story). My hatred of the embedded romance story factor makes it impossible for me to properly rank Bujold's work, while Cherryh's space combat merged into one generic  for me.Now that I think about it, having mentioned David Weber + Doc EE Smith within a sentence of each other, David Weber IS Doc EE Smith 2.0, no wonder why Jim Baen latched onto him with an open-ended lifetime contract. The same "quantity equals quality" battle descriptions, the same bland nothing about these stories makes sense, the same perfect heroes, the same "eugenics is good when its the heroes, eugenics is unspeakably vile when its anyone else", the same "only the villains are interesting characters with semi-believable goals" etc. As to Why people keep reading HH stories if they've read virtually ANYTHING ELSE scifi/mil-scifi, that's the question I've been asking since second 1 of thread creation. Sunken cost factor? Easy punching bag factor?
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Aug 12, 2019 13:46
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ianmacdo posted:He wrote another sequel with her, she goes to earth and does some stuff. There's a new trilogy in that universe just coming out;; the first one is 'The Accidental War'. I read it and ended up thinking 'am I suppose to be rooting for humanity here, because our heroes plunge the entire universe's financial system into chaos 2008-style, intentionally by loudly announcing to everyone in Parliament that space-Bear-Stearns is insolvent rather than talking to the space-SEC and giving them any kind of headsup whatsoever, then making a bank speculating on which non-human businesses go bankrupt. Seriously, I get that he had to come up with some way to set up a new conflict, but by the end I was rooting for us to be genocided.
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Aug 12, 2019 13:57
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Don't worry. I expect as soon as the Galactic Council finally notices the broadcast content seeping out of our backwater space I expect the launch of relavistic planet-killers to be expedited.
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Aug 12, 2019 14:55
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:As to Why people keep reading HH stories if they've read virtually ANYTHING ELSE scifi/mil-scifi, that's the question I've been asking since second 1 of thread creation. I havn't gotten the impression that anyone has been asking this seriously, and I know I have explained this before. But, I'll make an honest attempt at answering this question as I still read Weber, and HH despite a few books in a row being a bit bad(most recent one was finally a step back in the right direction)...I blame him using voice to text to write ever since he hurt his hand and him being too always sellable they arn't editing him as harshly as needed. His original plan getting thrown off and having to spend a few books getting it back on track didn't help either. But Weber always did one thing really well for me that I enjoyed, even if he does overuse it to death, and that is the setup of explaining a thing and how cool it is like a new strategy/missile system/capital ship whatever, think of it like modern marvels episode and how cool is but with spaceships. Then later after building up the anticipation it has to be used so you have the great reaction shots from all the people on the opposing side who didn't know being in shock and awe of the thing is that is really cool. I feel no urge to keep reading because sunken cost and even missed the book before the most recent because, well you can just read the reviews, even his fans were dunking on him. Also as much as you might complain about wow his action and battle scenes suck, it's the reason a lot of his fans that I know like his stuff, they want giant huge galactic size fleet battles because large??? I guess, and a focus on these doesn't exist for a reason, it's really hard to tell a story without running into lots of problems. Seriously go and try to think of a book series that has multiple large scale engagements that are actually described instead of glossed over. As someone who reads alot of sci-fi and mil-scifi in general eventually I run out of known better stuff and got a bit tired of playing the indie lottery and will grab one of his books instead.
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Aug 12, 2019 15:35
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:Then later after building up the anticipation it has to be used so you have the great reaction shots from all the people on the opposing side who didn't know being in shock and awe of the thing is that is really cool.
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Aug 12, 2019 15:40
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PupsOfWar posted:i think you two are getting masadans (the graysons' religious enemies who have no special physical properties) mixed up with scrags (the descendents of genetically-enhanced supersoldiers manufactured by pan-slavic nationalists long ago) Oh, you're right. I was totally thinking he meant just the Masadans because they're all over the stupid sidestories. I totally forgot the scrags were even really relevant bad guys for anything, since they were so dumb. And racist. Wow, they were pretty racist. 90s Cringe Rock posted:Or sometimes just "But none of this mattered, as none of the ships in this battle had it." The patented Info Dump Of Information That Will Never Be Relevant This Book.
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Aug 12, 2019 16:13
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One of the better space combat books is probably Three Body Problem/The Dark Forest and its sequels. It's bleak as hell Anyway the last two books are kind of boring and I suspect the translation isnt as good but the first one is incredible and I highly recommend it Larry Parrish fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Aug 12, 2019 |
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Aug 12, 2019 16:54
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Might want to spoiler most of that explanation text Larry Parrish, you managed to both give away and over-simplify most of the Three Body Problem/Dark Forest series plot at the same time. Three Body Problem had a interesting setup, but most of the book read like filler material designed to satisfy PRC censor reguirements. The Great Leap Forward opening was strong as hell though, while the actual 1st contact + book ending were good..
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Aug 12, 2019 19:11
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Xarn posted:After reading this thread, I have a question: Why do you keep reading HH books? My encounter with them went something like A mix of sunk cost, "hate watching," and "can the next one possibly be even worse?" I gave up buying Weber depressingly late in the day and still read several more books via the library before stopping in the middle of one and returning it. And I've only halted in the middle of reading a book six times in my entire life. Most of them were bad and forgettable; the ones I remember besides Weber are an L. Ron Hubbard book in his long sci-fi series and a book depressingly far-in to Stirling's Change War series. Common ground seems to have been having a lot of time to read and not enough reading material. Be happy you got yourself out so early; Hubbard's series is the only one I abandoned so quickly, though at least all of his stuff I got through the library.
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Aug 12, 2019 19:26
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:I havn't gotten the impression that anyone has been asking this seriously, and I know I have explained this before. But, I'll make an honest attempt at answering this question as I still read Weber, and HH despite a few books in a row being a bit bad(most recent one was finally a step back in the right direction)...I blame him using voice to text to write ever since he hurt his hand and him being too always sellable they arn't editing him as harshly as needed. His original plan getting thrown off and having to spend a few books getting it back on track didn't help either. I get what you are saying. I was trying to be diplomatic, and funnily enough, yes as thread creator, I have been asking that question you took mild umbrage at over and over. Part of the reason I created this thread was to expose people who " who reads alot of sci-fi and mil-scifi in general eventually There is a vast amount of forgotten mil-scifi + scifi stories from the victorian era to the polyester age out there waiting to rediscovered. Dig deep into the past via curated story collections by the Vandermeers or Dozois to discover new stuff. Or my personal preference: go crazy and read every published copy of Analog/Amazing Stories/etc from start to finish. You are guaranteed to find new authors or interesting stories, only the quality of the stories will vary wildly and the stories themselves be near unreadable at times.
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Aug 12, 2019 19:48
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Xarn posted:After reading this thread, I have a question: Why do you keep reading HH books? My encounter with them went something like Hey, to be fair. Book 2 is actually very different from book 1! Just, not in any good way. Book 1 was just Terrible Retread Of Horatio Hornblower Except Everyone Loves Horatio And Also The British Empire Are The Actual Good Guys. Anyways I just like being fair to an extent and knowing what I'm talking about when I rag on something, which is why I've finished reading too many bad books, so basically sunk cost fallacy but dumber.
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Aug 12, 2019 20:04
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Might want to spoiler most of that explanation text Larry Parrish, you managed to both give away and over-simplify most of the Three Body Problem/Dark Forest series plot at the same time. I havent met anyone who managed to make it through to the second book yet lol
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Aug 12, 2019 20:59
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:
I haven't read HH in a while but I can explain it from a different property: I still watch the Simpsons. I've seen every season. Yes, all of them. They haven't been good in a long time. The best they manage is sometimes not-bad. I watch it because it's familiar and not a huge time investment, and even while I admit they're objectively not good, there's a part of the show that always triggers the little nostalgic eleven year old me seeing those first magical episodes. I didn't get all the jokes until later, but it was a fun show. I suspect that people who read all of some very long series may feel similarly--after all, On Basilisk Station came out just four years after the Simpsons started, in 1993. I was still a teenager then. So were a lot of others. I did ultimately give up on Honor but sometimes it's hard to shake a bad habit that's familiar.
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Aug 12, 2019 21:11
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For me, the answer is convenience. I spend a lot of time driving for work, so most of the books I "read" are actually audiobooks. While I do have an Audible account, books on CD from the library are a huge percentage of my listening material. And if I'm in the mood for some spaceships going boom books on CD at a public library, it's Campbell or Weber or nothing, and I don't want nothing. Also, it had been long enough between the last couple of books that the trauma scabbed over.
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Aug 12, 2019 21:31
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got another bone to pick with john ringo w/r/t lacking basic or general knowledgeHell's Faire posted:But wrapping them around anti-hydrogen, without it coming into contact with them, was a whole nother ball of fullerene. this is a throwaway expositional line in the internal monolog of a tertiary character who doesn't matter, but it stood out to me immediately because it's bad geography and bad geology tennessee is not a major mining state and hasn't been since they played out most of their zinc and all of their copper and phosphate a long time ago (and phosphate mines are usually shallow-extraction operations, not deep shaft stuff) if i were a tennesseean and needed to quickly dig some deep mineshafts for testing antimatter containment, I would have to import shaft mining engineers from ky, west virginia or preferably pennsylvania. Or, most ideally, bring in someone from the silver mines in the american rockies or the uranium mines in the canadian rockies, where they do some real deep shaft stuff. The physicist character in this chapter would know this. one easy way to know this is that tennessee is not a mining state is that the university of tennessee (where this character supposedly works) does not have a mining engineering department or even offer a mining engineering degree, which other large universities in the appalachian region (UK, VT, Pitt, etc) do. now, I can see how this mistake would occur. he thinks, "look, I'm putting this in tennessee, the aliens ate all of the prestigious universities so now state colleges with regional footprints, like UT-Knoxville, are the new Ivies", then he thinks "okay, we'd need to dig a bunch of underground infrastructure for this testing", then finally he thinks "hell, they mine coal in the appalachians, tennessee is an appalachian state, there are a lot of coal miners in tennessee who could dig this infrastructure" if you look at a wiki map of US mountains, you can think "alright, thats all the cumberland plateau, its probably mostly the same stuff in there:  that's geography and geology for small babies though real geology is more complicated and is better represented by something like this:  mountain ranges don't really come from singular tectonic plate impact events the way they teach you in 2nd grade earth science, they come from successive orogenies and uplift events over the course of many millions of years, producing a "folding" effect which results in distinct geologic bands and islands. Minerologically speaking the result of this is that you can have a lot of variation of mineral strata within what would be nominally the same geographical area when viewed topographically or climatologically. specifically w/r/t this case, the most usable appalachian mineral deposits are on the broad western declivity of the mountain plateau (which does not really lie within tennessee) rather than the blue ridge heightst that the smokies are a part of its a weird thing to get worked up about, and Iit's not like I expect good science from ringo - in the same chapter, the same character notes that the greenhouse effect is "junk science" - but it bugs me that in a novel series where he leans heavily on Southern culture, he cannot be bothered to do casual research on the local economies of southern states. This makes me wonder - if he gets easy stuff wrong about his own backyard, how wrong must he be whenever he's writing about other countries? at least get your physiography straight, john ringo!!! also thats not how antimatter containment works/would work PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Aug 13, 2019 |
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Aug 13, 2019 06:41
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:I get what you are saying. I was trying to be diplomatic, and funnily enough, yes as thread creator, I have been asking that question you took mild umbrage at over and over. Part of the reason I created this thread was to expose people who " who reads alot of sci-fi and mil-scifi in general eventually Going through Analog/Amazing Stories is old hat, now a days the new coolness is dig through Royal Road or Kindle Unlimited, mostly KU for military sci-fi as most of the authors are older. The main issue I have is the vast majority of the ones I run across are okay, they arn't bad and I may read more but I'm not going to recommend them. Like if it somehow got missed I can recommend Caine Riordan Expeditionary Force To Honor you Call Us Spiral Wars Poor Man's Fight A Choice of Treasons I can also say don't read garbage like Starship Liberator Wizard Scout (it's mil sci-fi I know the name yeah yeah) I started reading Escape: Ark Ship book 1 by David Ryker and it's above average so far, but no recommend level yet and that's just how it goes.
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Aug 13, 2019 15:14
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Seems thread-appropriate: Military Logistics for Fantasy Writers The article discusses some elements in broad strokes like the idea that an average human needs about 3lbs worth of bread per day, so for an army of 10K you'd need 30K lbs of bread. Except of course rations wouldn't be stored as baked bread, they'd be flour to be baked or, more likely, raw grain for easy transport and storage. Then the soldiers would grind and bake their own bread--trail rations suck yo. The core argument she's making is more or less that authors should think about these things and stories that don't even have a whisper about them come across as inauthentic. I remember Deed of Paksenarrion talking about logistics to some degree though it didn't spend a lot of time describing them. I'm not writing mil-sff but I sometimes wonder stuff about both real military life (can you take your own personal condiments with you on patrols) and SF military life (Marko Kloos's military seems to love fraternization an awful lot) and little details can make the whole enterprise seem more real. Or completely fall flat like the guy talking about about why Tennessee is the wrong place for shaft mining expertise.
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Aug 13, 2019 16:31
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L.E Modesitt said he wrote his first Recluce book after a conversation with somebody about how the economics of fantasy worlds is always unrealistic, in an attempt to do better.
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Aug 13, 2019 18:14
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:Going through Analog/Amazing Stories is old hat, now a days the new coolness is dig through Royal Road or Kindle Unlimited, mostly KU for military sci-fi as most of the authors are older. The main issue I have is the vast majority of the ones I run across are okay, they arn't bad and I may read more but I'm not going to recommend them. Ah the tourist method....good for a superficial look and infinitely cleaner/cheaper than archaeological-style deep dives I suggested. An expedition through stacks and piles of old defunct scifi-fantasy trade magazines. The terribleness of the writing, the hokiness of the ads(especially cigarette ads), the dated views, the awkwarder-than-E/N-subforum letters to editor sections, and the smell of/need to disinfect-fumigate those mildewy and moldering trade magazines ......suffering through all those factors is maddeningly bad, but occasionally you will strike gold. fantasy/scifi /mil-fiction economics chat: Some genre authors grudginly bother mentioning how they have X amount of rations and supplies for the next X days. And once mentioned, that supply-factoid is rarely brought up again, even if there has been a insane amount of battle or weeks/months of time have passed before the narrative picks up again. David Weber, ugh I loving hate mentioning him, exists in this camp. One of the reasons why Grant's memoir's of the US Civil War holds up was because supplies + supply support was constant issue in them. The constant fuckups happening.also made Grant's US Civil War memoirs readable/worth power-skimming through. I remember General Burnside always getting poo poo-on by Grant, while General Sedgwick was Grant's "if only he had survived" white-whale, and of course, General Hooker doing the thing that made his surname forever-associated with a class of sex-workers.
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Aug 13, 2019 19:56
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:fantasy/scifi /mil-fiction economics chat: That's because in an actual military the interesting person we are following is never in charge of it and in anything large enough even the person in charge of it is only going to know the high level stuff, the nuts and bolts is delegated down to people who are, and nobody wants to read an entire story about supply officers. Though in real war on a huge scale there is constantly supply issues way more often then in fiction though it's normally something like guess we have a sock shortage(which is a very real and serious issue) or something simple that generally didn't get forgotten but a few factors went wrong, like your resupply being diverted to someone in more dire straits and you being kicked back in the list combined with a change in weather conditions. But in most sci-fi stories they break down into base resources they carry around and have magical devices that convert them to what they need, like a video game or something, that hugely simplifies how much the author and reader has to think about supply without becoming boring or unrealistic.
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Aug 13, 2019 22:39
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As far as fantasy logistics goes it's far better to either pretend your setting has magical food generation that's common place if you have enough money so it's not a concern, or you know, read a few books on military history. Theres a reason so many 'hard fantasy' novels feature at least one culture that straight up has the Roman legion system detail-for-detail. I'm pretty sure I read one that stole the Parthian/Persian system instead and I would be incredibly surprised if nobody's done one that stole from a random Chinese dynasty. Actually come to think of it, as boring as the Spellmonger series being a billion words that is essentially a slice of life story about wizards during an apocalyptic but medieval and therefore very slow war spends a ton of those words on how to handle logistics in rough terrain. I dont actually know enough to say if it's at all realistic but it sure sounds convincing, and its consistent in the story which is good enough for me Larry Parrish fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Aug 14, 2019 |
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Aug 14, 2019 02:16
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The impromptu thread survey question "As to Why people keep reading HH stories if they've read virtually ANYTHING ELSE scifi/mil-scifi, that's the question I've been asking since second 1 of thread creation." answers have been varied but interesting. Small answer base so far, hoping others will chime in. Sunken cost factor: 2 votes (Narsham, Kchama) Nostalgia: 2 votes (ShinsoBEAM!, occamsnailfile) Convenience: 1 vote (jng2058) Battered person syndrome: 2 votes (Narsham, Kchama) I don't read Weber/HH stories anymore: 0 votes
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Aug 14, 2019 03:45
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They help me lose track of time for a bit. Unfortunately, that means I can't Let's Hate-Read the series.
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Aug 14, 2019 03:54
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:The impromptu thread survey question "As to Why people keep reading HH stories if they've read virtually ANYTHING ELSE scifi/mil-scifi, that's the question I've been asking since second 1 of thread creation." answers have been varied but interesting. Small answer base so far, hoping others will chime in. Something to do on those long nights at sea
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Aug 14, 2019 04:07
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:That's because in an actual military the interesting person we are following is never in charge of it and in anything large enough even the person in charge of it is only going to know the high level stuff, the nuts and bolts is delegated down to people who are, and nobody wants to read an entire story about supply officers. Though in real war on a huge scale there is constantly supply issues way more often then in fiction though it's normally something like guess we have a sock shortage(which is a very real and serious issue) or something simple that generally didn't get forgotten but a few factors went wrong, like your resupply being diverted to someone in more dire straits and you being kicked back in the list combined with a change in weather conditions. But in most sci-fi stories they break down into base resources they carry around and have magical devices that convert them to what they need, like a video game or something, that hugely simplifies how much the author and reader has to think about supply without becoming boring or unrealistic. Mobile Suit Gundam actually had an arc where the carrier the good guys were based out of was running out of everything including most critically salt because the initial attack that had sent them on the endless run had been done in the middle of the ship being loaded up with weapons and supplies and they were desperately just searching anywhere for something to tide them over until they could find a base that could resupply them despite their pursuers.
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Aug 14, 2019 04:18
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