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StrixNebulosa posted:Has the plot advanced at all? It's like she got to Basilisk Station and now the plot is suspended while she grinds loot and reputation off the easy mobs. Not really. For the most part it's been about stopping the smugglers and everyone talking how great she is and also dunking on the Villain Characters. All the stuff with figuring out what the smugglers are up to is severely undercut by the fact that Weber decided to spell it all out as the prologue, so even though technically the plot would be moving forward a little bit, it hasn't because we already know what's really going on. And it's not done in a way that the tension is the gap between the reader's knowledge and the characters' knowledge, because there's no danger to it. So yes, it's currently grinding.
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# ? Dec 30, 2019 04:00 |
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 02:15 |
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cultureulterior posted:I really like the RCN series, although it is funny that every single person on every other planet they go to is so hilariously incompetent- feels kinda like D&D in space where everyone else has a npc class It's so, so, much better than you'd think if someone told you 'Aubrey and Marturin in space'
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# ? Dec 30, 2019 06:41 |
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Honestly I think I'm revising my score of 'medicore' for On Basilisk Station to 'bad'. The entire book so far has been boring Honor worship. There hasn't even been any action of any sort in this supposed space battle book. Even the Fleet Problem scene just more or less skipped past all the actual action to talk about what happened instead of showing it. And the prologue ruined any mystery the book could have. And there's been very little to no exposition on things the reader REALLY needs to know about. Hell, the prologue had more exposition on the state of the setting than the entire rest of the book combined.
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# ? Dec 30, 2019 20:10 |
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If this series made any sense and catching a bajillion smuggers was: 1) Easy enough that one light cruiser can do it. and 2) A way for the captain to make fat stacks of cash from prize money. Then this implies that the station would be an absolute prime posting given to picked captains whom the power that be wanted to reward with personal enrichment. The only other alternative would be that the people doing the smuggling are very successfully bribing the admiralty/government/whomever to not catch smuggling. So Honour should be immediately told to lay off and potentially shitcanned, or the prizes should be contested in court and her stripped of the money then in trouble, or legbreakers should make her an offer she cannot refuse then kidnap her parents and return them in small boxes if she attempts to regardless. Obviously none of these interesting things happen.
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# ? Dec 30, 2019 22:59 |
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Patrat posted:If this series made any sense and catching a bajillion smuggers was: Pretty much. Weber REALLY wanted Honor to have a primo post where she makes a ton of money and fame by doing what would make it a primo post, but cast it as a punishment so she can have a 'underdog rising up' narrative despite her being given the plummest post in the entire universe, but for some reason the Manticore government has designated it Siberia despite the opposite. Maybe it's because he wanted her to meet Pavel Young too, and was afraid that if he had been in a plum position he might seem competent or make it clear that nepotism is really bad in Manticore. And Weber is extremely adverse to making villains seem competent in any way, with them pretty much all being idiotic losers that Honor ridicules over and over if she even knows who they are. It would be very interesting if her actions here had that kind of response, but it's a couple/few books before she even has real domestic issues.
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# ? Dec 30, 2019 23:32 |
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You could probably re-write On Basilisk station to be more compelling with some moderate changes like that, but alas what would be the point.
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# ? Dec 30, 2019 23:34 |
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Jack2142 posted:You could probably re-write On Basilisk station to be more compelling with some moderate changes like that, but alas what would be the point. It'd require me to add some actual plot, as it's extremely thin on relevance. The whole smuggler plot isn't even fully related to Haven. Good ole Denver Summervale of the next chapter is another dumb evil nobility. Relatedly, I love the dichotomy that nobility is bad, but royalty is good.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 00:00 |
I believe Pavel Young is one of the few Manticore commanders Haven is allowed to win against.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 00:42 |
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I believe Pavel Young is one of the few Manticore commanders Haven is allowed to win against. This is not really because she's worse then them, though. It's always because of events conspiring against her so she's a perpetual underdog at all times. EDIT: While I'm getting my post for tonight together, I wanted to mention something from the previous chapter that is a trope that always annoys me. Let me repaste the relevant quote. ”Bait” posted:"Don't feel too bad. Instead, tell me why the computer didn't nail you?" Namely, the idea that computers are always predictable and that humans can outdo computers simply by not always being predictable. Anyone who has ever played a video game can probably tell you that unless you have some extreme understanding of a simple AI involved to the point that you know how to manipulate it, this isn't going to be the case. Bugs and errors in programming cause all sorts of unusual AI behavior all the time. And this idea that AI is always simple and predictable is dumb. Anyways, the post will be up in an hour or so. Kchama fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Dec 31, 2019 |
# ? Dec 31, 2019 00:49 |
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Kchama posted:Pretty much. Weber REALLY wanted Honor to have a primo post where she makes a ton of money and fame by doing what would make it a primo post, but cast it as a punishment so she can have a 'underdog rising up' narrative despite her being given the plummest post in the entire universe, but for some reason the Manticore government has designated it Siberia despite the opposite. All he really had to do was make it an honestly poo poo-tier post where she catches one single ship that's worth a metric fuckton of prize money. Make it a fluke that she legitimately only catches through diligence, instead of having every third loving ship smuggling ivory to the point where any quarter-assed attempt at customs enforcement should have been catching ships left and right.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 01:26 |
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Khizan posted:All he really had to do was make it an honestly poo poo-tier post where she catches one single ship that's worth a metric fuckton of prize money. Make it a fluke that she legitimately only catches through diligence, instead of having every third loving ship smuggling ivory to the point where any quarter-assed attempt at customs enforcement should have been catching ships left and right. Weber actually has it both ways. She's constantly catching ships AND the ones she catches are worth huge prize money. And it's time! Last time, on On Basilisk Station Chapter 13 I previewed this chapter! So I’ll just skip that part as it’s boring anyways. Anyways, Denver Summervale is a Bad Man. And is doing drug-running and smuggling. ”There’s not a lot to say, so I’ll put it all at the bottom” posted:Summervale took one look at the face on his com screen, then nodded curtly to the duty operator. The man departed without a word, and Summervale seated himself in the chair he'd abandoned. Long habit drew his eyes to the panel, double-checking the scrambler circuits, before he looked up at the man on the screen. Besides the use of ‘circuits’ for multiple things like it’s a buzz word for him, this is more or less just reiterating everything we know but from the other side, beyond that Denver Summervale and his client exists and there’s a mole in the NPA. Oh yeah, also I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know what a tithe is, as he uses it to mean ‘ten percent’, and I’m drat sure it means ‘a tenth of your annual earnings taken as Church tax’ or giving a tax church. Whereas ‘a tithe of the equipment out’ is totally wrong usage. Also by the way, Dever Summervale apparently does everything evil, because he’also an assassin for hire for Manticore’s amazing system of duelling. Yes, duelling. It’s literally only there so Honor can legally kill her domestic foes. The next bit of the chapter is basically Denver Summervale spelling things out for the readers. He actually has a lot of backstory spelled out for someone who isn’t very important on the whole of things. Basically he doesn’t understand why his boss doesn’t care about his operations being destroyed and wants to push super-violent drugs specifically. HMMM, who is obviously behind this? It’s Haven. He then flashes back to when he got drummed out of the Navy (anyways shouldn’t this be the Spacey? It’s all space-side) in a court-martial, for the crime of being evil. ”EVIL!” posted:He dropped back into the chair before the com terminal, grinning dangerously at the blank screen. His father had been there, too, he recalled. His pious, noble father, clinging to the fringes of the Summervale glory despite his poverty. What had the high and mighty family ever given them, that they should ape its manners and honor its name? Their branch had none of the wealth, none of the power, that clung to the direct line of the Dukes of Cromarty! So this whole duelling thing is another thing taken from the Horatio Hornblower books and done super bad and dumb. That by the way is the chapter. It furthers really nothing except ‘we have a villain’.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 02:01 |
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Spacy, not Spacey, but yes. It should be Spacy.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 02:17 |
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Kchama posted:Namely, the idea that computers are always predictable and that humans can outdo computers simply by not always being predictable. Anyone who has ever played a video game can probably tell you that unless you have some extreme understanding of a simple AI involved to the point that you know how to manipulate it, this isn't going to be the case. Bugs and errors in programming cause all sorts of unusual AI behavior all the time. And this idea that AI is always simple and predictable is dumb. This isn't that at all. She's not saying "You need to be more unpredictable to be better than the computer" or anything of that sort. She's saying "The AI assigns the enemy a randomly determined human-speed reaction time, and you were lucky that it missed the window. A fast enough opponent could have made that shot." That's a fairly common things with AI opponents in games. The AI has the potential for literally inhuman reaction times and precision, which is why they're programmed to react at human-manageable speeds. That's why sniper bots don't drill you 12 frames after you step into LOS, etc.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 02:26 |
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Khizan posted:This isn't that at all. She's not saying "You need to be more unpredictable to be better than the computer" or anything of that sort. She's saying "The AI assigns the enemy a randomly determined human-speed reaction time, and you were lucky that it missed the window. A fast enough opponent could have made that shot." Well, yes, but she talks about the 'human element' which is always code that 'the computer is predictable'. I cut it out but she mentions that she used this to actually beat the computer in the exact same sim he lost in, because it turns out that the computer had its predictable 3 seconds to react but humans can react faster than a predictable ole computer. It's also a longer theme in the entire series. There's a Pearl of Weber about how in the background there's AIs that do a lot of the stuff that he portrays people doing in the books, but that they're strictly inferior to actually having people working it because of said human element. An 'expert software's' point-defense is predictable and easily defeatable by any skilled human operator. Also in a 'Manticore is better than you' thing, Manticore ships have the best AI in the universe. What's that, you say? This sort of thing never comes up in the books? Silly, it's because Weber doesn't believe in telling you anything! David Weber posted:There's not what I think of as fully developed artificial intelligence in the Honorverse. What there is might be thought of as highly developed "expert" software packages. At the same time, there's an enormous amount of what would probably be called AI (although not strictly correctly so, as I understand the term) which is subsumed. As you know, I tend to assume that a lot of the standard science-fiction high-tech goodies are going to be so much a part of the background and infrastructure of the characters in my novels that I let them sort of disappear into the background. It seems to me that someone living in Honor's time would spend as much time thinking about nanotechnology, let's say, as someone in our own time spends thinking about the technology used in bringing us frozen or freeze-dried food products. It's just there, doing its thing very quietly in the background, without attracting a great deal of notice. 90s Cringe Rock posted:Spacy, not Spacey, but yes. It should be Spacy. Yeah, I always typo it, thanks. Kchama fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Dec 31, 2019 |
# ? Dec 31, 2019 02:30 |
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All the bitching and moaning about seemingly everyone + their space-cats smuggling goods in On Basilisk Station that even a quarter-assed attempt at customs enforcement should have been catching ships left and right was the 2nd thing I found believable and realistic in OBS. If anything, think Weber toned down how nakedly rapacious and corrupt the East India Company was regarding India(Medusa) and China/East Indies (Basilisk Station). Man just realized the East India Company as an unofficial-official trade arm of the UK was directly responsible for so many loving wars and revolutions in the world.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 03:05 |
Kchama posted:Oh yeah, also I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know what a tithe is, as he uses it to mean ‘ten percent’, and I’m drat sure it means ‘a tenth of your annual earnings taken as Church tax’ or giving a tax church. Whereas ‘a tithe of the equipment out’ is totally wrong usage. He's using the term correctly, albeit in a use that's fairly uncommon. Dictionary.com posted:
As for the smuggling, there's historical precedent. The British colonies in North America were under heavy trade restrictions before the War of Independence, leading to huge amounts of smuggling that the Royal Navy mostly ignored for various reasons, for one thing.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 05:29 |
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Gnoman posted:He's using the term correctly, albeit in a use that's fairly uncommon. Maybe he should put away his thesaursus, geez. I never questioned the historical precedent, just the attitude that it was Political Siberia despite being a very easily lucrative post if you put any effort into it at all.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 05:36 |
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It's totally bizzare because in every single book about sailing I've ever read, everyone is insanely thirsty for any posting where prizes are a reasonable possibility and yet somehow the Manticoran Navy does the prize system and not even random enlisted sailors give a poo poo.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 06:57 |
Kchama posted:
The thing is that the only reason that it is so lucrative to smuggle there is the fact that nobody puts any effort into it. The smugglers are doing business there because they realized that lax policing made it easy to operate there. There's no particular in-system reason why they're doing it there - as is amply demonstrated when most of the smugglers pack up and leave later in the book.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 07:03 |
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Gnoman posted:The thing is that the only reason that it is so lucrative to smuggle there is the fact that nobody puts any effort into it. The smugglers are doing business there because they realized that lax policing made it easy to operate there. There's no particular in-system reason why they're doing it there - as is amply demonstrated when most of the smugglers pack up and leave later in the book. I mean, that's just the smuggling to Medusa. There's no way most of the smugglers quit the system, though. Why? Because it's one of the main ways to Manticore. So it's always going to have smuggling. And hell, Manticore's biggest trade firm smuggles through that terminus. That's why it's a plum posting. You either make a ton of money doing something not terribly difficult, or you have an easy posting because doing the easy stuff scared off all the work.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 07:17 |
I'm pretty sure you're reading it wrong. Let me pull up the ebook real quick.quote:"During my own tenure, however, that situation has changed, not so much because of trade with the Medusans as because of the growing volume of traffic through the terminus here. I suppose it was inevitable that an orbital warehousing and distribution network should spring up, particularly since cargoes can be transshipped here without paying the higher duties and wages incurred in Manticore. There are, of course, other incentives," she added dryly, and Honor's lips twitched unwillingly. quote:She let her eyes drift back to the main maneuvering display, pondering the ships in orbit around Medusa. Fearless had been on station for almost a full Manticoran month now, and there were far fewer than there had been when she arrived five weeks before; a direct result, she suspected, of Ensign Tremaine's campaign against illegal traffic. Medusa was no longer a good place to transship prohibited goods, and the word was getting around. Much of the traffic in the system is using the orbital warehouses. A freighter comes in, offloads their cargo, picks up what's waiting for them, and sails off. This reduces the amount of ships that have to pay to use the Junction, reducing the fees that Manticore can charge them. Because nobody's policing this system, smugglers are using the same setup to traffic in contraband. The setup isn't explained, but if it follows realistic patterns then the Mandragoran would have offloaded their illegal cargo onto the warehouse, picked up other goods already scheduled for it, then proceeded onward. Other ships would have then loaded the illegal cargo onto and carried it to the buyers. This works extremely well, as long as nobody's opening the cargo boxes and just relying on a check of the cargo manifest and a check of the customs seals. Once people start opening the boxes, it becomes a "we can't go there anymore!" situation.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 07:40 |
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Gnoman posted:I'm pretty sure you're reading it wrong. Let me pull up the ebook real quick. I was more getting at that even when the Medusan smuggling dries up, there's still smuggling through the wormhole to the parts it connects through and back. The orbital warehouses are just part of it but smuggling isn't just going to dry up because the easy mode where nobody checked ever stops happening. But again, that's part of why this is such a plum position that we're saying. A single light cruiser cleaned up smuggling and made a mint doing so, because being in charge of this station means being in charge of one of the biggest trading lanes MAnticore has, which is MONEY CENTRAL. EDIT: Like, for example, Panama Canal is a lot easier to police on the whole, and smuggling still happens in it rampantly. And here you get paid super handsomely for finding smugglers! And if Weber thinks that this will clean up smugglers for good, then he's naive. They'll just change their tactics rather than not even bothering with the slightest bit of deception. Kchama fucked around with this message at 08:40 on Dec 31, 2019 |
# ? Dec 31, 2019 08:34 |
I don't think that he's trying to imply that smuggling ceases, just that a lot of it moves elsewhere because it is no longer easy. Let me use a different analogy. Picture the system as a park in the middle of the city. For the last several years, the city hasn't spent much on police, and the PD has only assigned a couple of officers to patrol the park at night. The ones that do get assigned there are older cops who no longer care, and just sit at the donut shop or nap in their patrol cars. So the place becomes an open-air drug marketplace, with dealers not even trying to hide what's going on because they know the cops aren't going to bother them. Then a new hotshot comes in and decides that he's not going to be a slacker. He comes in, makes a few high-profile busts, and gets all kinds of attention. So dealers stop blatantly using the park, with some going elsewhere and others being careful enough to avoid attention. Doesn't do anything to stem the total trade, doesn't even keep drugs out of the park. But it does make the whole thing a lot less visible. That's basically the situation here. Harrington's crews made some big busts, primarily from people who weren't expecting to be inspected at all - note that Mondragon's officers start panicking as soon as Tremaine announced an intention to do a physical check - he knew full well that they weren't going to slip by. This strongly suggests that, under any other circumstances, the smuggling would be both lower in volume, and much better concealed. This would make it much harder to make much prize money by nabbing contraband without going too far in harassing merchants. Now, you're focusing on how much prize money acts as an incentive. The rate mentioned is that .5% goes to the ship, which is then divided among the crew. Dipping outside the text, the wiki sets the crew of a Courageous-class cruiser at 200. If shares are equal, that means that each crewmember would receive .5% of what the ship gets, making each crewman's share .0025%. That means that, in order for a crewman to receive $1 in prize money, the ship would have to take $40000 in contraband. Traditionally, shares in prize money are not equal, with more going to the officers than to the ordinary crew, but Weber doesn't break this down, so we'll go with that figure. In this case, they're taking huge volumes of high-value stuff, so the money's pretty good. $1.5 billion (the figure quoted without Mondragon's value) equals a nice $37,500 each. Now, let us assume that Young had been as industrious and seized the same cargo. Warlock is a Star Knight class cruiser, which the wiki states has a crew of 925. Skipping the math, that works out to only $8100 per share, just by substituting a bigger ship. If you start adding in the multiple ships the book says should be in the system, or drop the value of what's seized to account for the "we're actually bothering to hide what we're doing" factor, the value plummets. Or, rather, the station's only lucrative because the money's being given to a very small ship, and the smugglers are making themselves really easy to catch.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 09:35 |
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Gnoman posted:I don't think that he's trying to imply that smuggling ceases, just that a lot of it moves elsewhere because it is no longer easy. I don't think we're disagreeing in the least. Though I will note that the share Honor is stated to be getting was 500k, so you can probably figure out how it is from there. So for the captains it's pretty lucrative, since it's assumed they can just demand a big enough share that no matter what they're getting lots of money, and it's the captains who are going to be finding it the plum position, not the crewmen. Because even with if Honor only got one or two big hauls a year, she'd be sitting at a cool million in Manticore bucks, which is stated to be worth more a hell of a lot more than money anywhere else. Kchama fucked around with this message at 10:23 on Dec 31, 2019 |
# ? Dec 31, 2019 10:19 |
Kchama posted:I don't think we're disagreeing in the least. At some point, I think I forgot the point I was trying to make and was focusing too much on finding other ways to explain it. There is something else I wanted to comment on - the segment you're talking about here: Kchama posted:
Relying on a human to "pull the trigger" in a situation as simple as this is ludicrous - spotting a clear line of sight and firing is extremely simple for a computer. Having it be a "the computer cannot fire unless this button is depressed" safety measure would make sense, but if Weber wanted to focus on a "the human element matters" notion this is a stupid way to do it.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 10:35 |
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Gnoman posted:Relying on a human to "pull the trigger" in a situation as simple as this is ludicrous - spotting a clear line of sight and firing is extremely simple for a computer. Having it be a "the computer cannot fire unless this button is depressed" safety measure would make sense, but if Weber wanted to focus on a "the human element matters" notion this is a stupid way to do it. There aren't any edge cases in space combat in this setting where you wouldn't just have the firing button taped down. Weber has accidentally created a situation where having expert crew doesn't loving matter because the AI can get shots off faster and in narrow windows that a human tac officer might not have seen.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 10:57 |
mllaneza posted:There aren't any edge cases in space combat in this setting where you wouldn't just have the firing button taped down. Weber has accidentally created a situation where having expert crew doesn't loving matter because the AI can get shots off faster and in narrow windows that a human tac officer might not have seen. Exactly. For the task of taking a shot, the computer is best. Keeping a human in the loop to ensure that the computer doesn't shoot at the wrong time (either because you don't want to risk it identifying a civilian or damaged friendly as a valid target, or because you want to ensure your guns are ready at a specific time) makes sense, but that's not what's being depicted. That's a general problem in the series as a whole. He makes a big deal out of crew quality, and makes the effort to show significant differences in outcome between a bad crew and a good one, but rarely actually shows how that comes about.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 11:13 |
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Gnoman posted:At some point, I think I forgot the point I was trying to make and was focusing too much on finding other ways to explain it. It's cool. I understand you're here, keeping me honest and making sure I don't gently caress up. I just figured out that which is why I had to bluntly tell you we weren't disagreeing rather than let the misunderstanding continue. As for the second paragraph: Yeah. I was making that point but it came out kind of clumsy because I forgot I left out some relevant details because they had annoyed me. Gnoman posted:Exactly. For the task of taking a shot, the computer is best. Keeping a human in the loop to ensure that the computer doesn't shoot at the wrong time (either because you don't want to risk it identifying a civilian or damaged friendly as a valid target, or because you want to ensure your guns are ready at a specific time) makes sense, but that's not what's being depicted. Double agreed. That's why I pointed out the Pearl of Weber because it claims that there's a huge level of automation in the background but at the same time, per the written word, the ships have people doing everything anyways so the automation ends up unused and redundant in a bad way. The Pearl actually goes on to say that ship 'expert packages' degrade in quality as a ship takes damage, causing poor performance even when this wouldn't make sense. They specify this as a weakness of MAnticorean ships as they are very automated, whereas apparently Haven ships are less automated and therefore do not have as much of a degrade in performance as a ship is damaged which... what?
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 12:31 |
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it's also weird because like 95% of the space combat in the entire series is swarms of missiles which get some minor programming from humans but are otherwise entirely AI controlled. so clearly they impact the setting significantly.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 12:49 |
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Kchama posted:That's why I pointed out the Pearl of Weber because it claims that there's a huge level of automation in the background but at the same time, per the written word, the ships have people doing everything anyways so the automation ends up unused and redundant in a bad way. The Pearl actually goes on to say that ship 'expert packages' degrade in quality as a ship takes damage, causing poor performance even when this wouldn't make sense. They specify this as a weakness of MAnticorean ships as they are very automated, whereas apparently Haven ships are less automated and therefore do not have as much of a degrade in performance as a ship is damaged which... what? Probably just Weber thinking of it as narrative around a pen & paper wargame.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 12:52 |
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Kchama posted:Relatedly, I love the dichotomy that nobility is bad, but royalty is good. That is another thing Weber uses to make Manticore "Britain, but in Space!", as the power struggle between royals and nobility is a huge part of British history. In essence, every monarchy before Absolutism was invented (and every non-absolutist monarchy after), was in a constant power struggle between the nominally independent nobility and the ruling monarch. If the monarch wins, you get an absolutist monarchy like in Prussia or France, if the nobles win, you get disasters in waiting like the Noble-republic of Poland. The only thing I would change about this in Weber's books is making it clearer that this struggle is a thing which happens in the setting, instead of hoping your modern audience has read more then just SF-novels and knows their history. mllaneza posted:There aren't any edge cases in space combat in this setting where you wouldn't just have the firing button taped down. Weber has accidentally created a situation where having expert crew doesn't loving matter because the AI can get shots off faster and in narrow windows that a human tac officer might not have seen. I think there is a scene in a later book where Havenite raiders manage to drop out of hyperspace right next to a superdreadnought, and realize they're utterly hosed, since they know they can't possibly to more than a bit of inconsequential damage before the totally surprised, helpless super-capital ship next to them uses their automated defenses to just delete them from the universe. And then the superdreadnought indeed wipes them out before its crew even has the chance to really notice what is going on.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 14:43 |
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Wouldn't the purpose of pinnacles and drones on a light cruiser be to set up a custom enforcement network or something similar? Everything, even the station keeping modifications are standard issue gear and it seems like Honor is arbitrarily insisting on an exhausting pace.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 15:04 |
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Monocled Falcon posted:Wouldn't the purpose of pinnacles and drones on a light cruiser be to set up a custom enforcement network or something similar? Yes. A light cruiser's internal stocks of drones and small ships for the most part were sufficient enough to set up a custom enforcement network. FuturePastNow posted:Probably just Weber thinking of it as narrative around a pen & paper wargame. I won't deny that this is likely the case.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 16:31 |
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Kchama posted:I don't think we're disagreeing in the least. The captain's share of the prize money is probably the same regardless of the size of the ship, meaning that nobody cracking down on the smuggling makes even less sense. It does not matter how lazy the captains you are posting here are if they can earn 10x their salary if they are even moderately active in pushing their crew to catch smugglers and do their job. There is no evidence they were being bribed to look the other way (nobody tries to lean on Honour at all) and the admiralty up the chain seem thrilled with things (no pressure from there), so the only possibly answer is that they were all preemptively lobotomised through divine intervention in order to make Honour look good and get rich.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 20:49 |
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Patrat posted:The captain's share of the prize money is probably the same regardless of the size of the ship, meaning that nobody cracking down on the smuggling makes even less sense. It does not matter how lazy the captains you are posting here are if they can earn 10x their salary if they are even moderately active in pushing their crew to catch smugglers and do their job. There is no evidence they were being bribed to look the other way (nobody tries to lean on Honour at all) and the admiralty up the chain seem thrilled with things (no pressure from there), so the only possibly answer is that they were all preemptively lobotomised through divine intervention in order to make Honour look good and get rich. It's pretty great that the admiralty is all "Man it sure is good someone is doing something about On Basilisk Station, it sure is everyone but our's fault". Especially since I'm pretty sure that they could send people to clean it up if they REALLY wanted to, since Hemphill was able to send Honor there, so it isn't just people who are on Janacek's personal poo poo-list. Also, it seems to very much say that they have literally never spent any money to make it a proper place border crossing/cargo shipping lane inspection point, when Honor's actions make it pretty clear that for a price you'd think the admiralty would be willing to pay they could safeguard their borders and one of the few ways their economy even works (if you accept that anyone else in the entirety of Manticore sees all the money that a couple of firms earn, since the reason why Manticore is so rich is from taxing goods going through their wormhole and not direct trading that Manticore does itself). It was stated to cost less than 300m Manticore Bucks to set up the makeshift and probably extra expensive system they had going on. FuturePastNow posted:Probably just Weber thinking of it as narrative around a pen & paper wargame. Also to add to this as to WHY I think that's the case and it not just being a dismissive joke, a lot of Honorverse is specifically based on a tabletop game that Weber was the designer of. Which is why Manticore's entire economy is based on trading in some form (because economy in the game he designed was entirely based around trading) and why the ship classes work the way they do, being entirely based on relative size as opposed to other features, which is... the same as his tabletop game, right down to the class names of the ships themselves.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 22:23 |
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Kchama posted:Also to add to this as to WHY I think that's the case and it not just being a dismissive joke, a lot of Honorverse is specifically based on a tabletop game that Weber was the designer of. Which is why Manticore's entire economy is based on trading in some form (because economy in the game he designed was entirely based around trading) and why the ship classes work the way they do, being entirely based on relative size as opposed to other features, which is... the same as his tabletop game, right down to the class names of the ships themselves. OBS also came right after he finished the second Starfire novel which is literally the novelization of a wargame campaign. So he had it on the brain. More than usual, that is. E: Crusade also has a character named Hannah who is a battlecruiser captain until she rules-lawyers her way into declaring martial law over a colony behind enemy lines, defending it and ruling it as a military dictator until it gets liberated by friendly forces, and her face gets hosed up in the final battle. By the fourth Starfire novel, she's been promoted to Sky Marshal. David Weber doesn't have very many characters. He just likes a few specific ones. FuturePastNow fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Dec 31, 2019 |
# ? Dec 31, 2019 23:11 |
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Kchama posted:It was stated to cost less than 300m Manticore Bucks to set up the makeshift and probably extra expensive system they had going on. She made it out of missiles, and the book said that the missiles are a million plus spacebucks even without the warheads and whatnot. Using actual proper beacons and whatnot would probably be cheaper by a couple of orders of magnitude.
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 23:14 |
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FuturePastNow posted:OBS also came right after he finished the second Starfire novel which is literally the novelization of a wargame campaign. So he had it on the brain. More than usual, that is. Blaze Ward's CS-405 series is basically the behind enemy lines but in space concept except executed way better. Highly recommend
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# ? Dec 31, 2019 23:50 |
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Time for On Basilisk Station Chapter Fifteen! They really should have just cut out the Prologue and let an expanded version of this be the introduction to Haven. Also this is our first real experience with the actual villains, halfway through the book. That prologue was pretty awful, considering that this is a much better scene to introduce Haven on. It’s still not all that good, but it’s a drat sight better than the “We’re evil and here’s our exact plans” prologue.”Evil, hard eyes” posted:The well-dressed man looked vaguely out of place in the luxurious office's comfortably cushioned chair and his civilian clothing, despite his expensive tailoring. His face was dark and lean, the sort of face which has been trained to say only what its owner wants it to say, and his eyes were hard as he accepted the chilled glass and sipped. Ice rattled like brittle music as he lowered the glass, and his host sank into a facing chair and tried not to look anxious. Pavel Young is so useless that even the bad guys know he’s a useless gently caress and planned everything around him being the Weber Bad Guy of the book. ”Villain Chat” posted:"Yes. Well, things were moving exactly according to plan until she turned up. Since then—" Canning broke off and shrugged, raising one hand, palm uppermost. ‘said with deadly precision’ just had me have to pause and laugh, wow. ”This is all this chapter is, is villain chat” posted:"We're not exactly completely naked, Sir," he said. "I know it's only a matter of time before her recon flights hit pay dirt, but as I've said, and despite any overconfidence on my part, we do have a multi-level cover in place against exactly that eventuality. And despite her activities in space, she hasn't even come close to bothering Captain Coglin. As for the rest of her actions," he added a bit more defensively, "I've done everything I can to get her recalled. I've lodged over twenty individual protests, now, and I'm using my contacts with other off-world merchant factors to generate more of them. The Manticoran Admiralty has to be feeling the heat, particularly in light of the political ramifications." I’m tempted to cut something from this, but it’s pretty much a solid wall of exposition. It means I can probably cut out Weber inevitably repeating it later. This is also a very short chapter, notably. It’s just this one short scene. ”Villain Chat More” posted:The admiral raised his eyebrows, and Canning felt himself smile almost naturally as he continued. As much as Weber characters suck, this is actually the most interesting chapter in the book, because it’s not all Honor-praise OR dunking on ineffectual villains. These guys actually aren’t completely useless punching bags! Completely, that is. ”Close to last quote” posted:"With all due respect, Sir, I think that's unlikely. They'd have to know what was coming and lay contingency plans ahead of time to affect the actual operation in any material way. Oh, I don't deny they can probably limit the damage, but I don't see any possible way that they could limit it enough to make a real difference. As long as they can't stop it entirely, we still have our opening, and not even a full company of Marines already in place in the enclaves can do that." Now, you may be thinking, “Oh, this is where they sent people in Manticore to threaten Honor in a way that she can’t fight back from, to make her stand down.... ”Well, you’d be...” posted:"Of course, Mr. Canning." The admiral actually chuckled. "I'm quite certain Harrington has irritated the Manticoran merchant cartels as badly as she has us. From what you've reported about her operations, she's already cost them a bundle, and that doesn't even consider the humiliation she's no doubt inflicted by catching them with their hands dirty. I suspect most of them are just as eager as we are to see her teeth pulled, wouldn't you agree?" Wrong, they’re just having Hauptman register a formal complaint.
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# ? Jan 1, 2020 00:16 |
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 02:15 |
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I see everyone's New Year's Resolution was to abandon the Mil-Scifi Fiction thread. Wise posters, one and all.
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# ? Jan 1, 2020 10:32 |