Anshu posted:

I'm pretty sure she means a filial sort of love.

Anshu posted:

Raoul is 52 years older than Honor (96 to her 44 in this book) where Hamish is only 39 years older. That 13 years may not seem like all that much of a difference between the two men, but you should also consider the contexts in which they meet Honor. Raoul met Honor when she was at Saganami, presumably sometime during her initial Cadet training from the ages of 14 to 18, while Hamish never meets Honor until the end of this book, at which point she's a grown woman. By the time Hamish has his epiphany ten years down the line at the age of 93, Honor herself is 54 – and neither of them perform their attraction to the other until ~8 years later, when they're 101 and 62, respectively.

Kchama posted:

You type all that out like it really matters as to whether or not Weber likes 20-30 year old women hooking up with much older men. Especially since the age difference is the same through all of that and Honor still looks 40 years younger than him no matter what.

Kchama posted:

You type all that out like it really matters as to whether or not Weber likes 20-30 year old women hooking up with much older men. Especially since the age difference is the same through all of that and Honor still looks 40 years younger than him no matter what.

Wibla posted:

I never got that vibe about Honor and that particular admiral in that book, though. Is your opinion coloured by having read the later books?

Anshu posted:

The age difference stays the same (that's how time works), but as a fraction of their respective ages it decreases. A 30yo with a 20yo is iffy, but a 40yo with a 30yo much less so, and a 60yo with a 50yo barely merits mention. This is a more extreme example, both in terms of the size of the gap and the lifespans involved, but the principle still applies.

As for your accusation regarding Weber's taste for pairing younger women with older men, the only other examples springing to my mind are from The Apocalypse Troll and (God help me) the Empire of Man series he did with John Ringo. I can't recall any similar age gaps portrayed with similar levels of okay-ness in the Honorverse spinoffs and short stories, or Dahak, or the Multiverse. Safehold could maybe count depending on how you want to judge a theoretically immortal 1000-year-old-but-has-only-been-awake-for-about-30-years male-passing/identifying robot with the uploaded mind and memories of a long-dead female space naval officer getting together with a 50-plus-year-old spymistress/madam.

What I'm saying is, you're trying to make out like this is some skeevy urge Weber habitually expresses through his writing, but the evidence for that assertion is pretty thin on the ground as far as I can remember.

Kchama posted:

I mean it was an off-hand joke because Honor absolutely has a canon thing for older men, so it's not like you can't claim she doesn't.

Aerdan posted:

[citation needed]

Counterpoints: throughout the entire series she has had only three romantic/sexual relationships.

1. as a student at Saganami Island, with another student
2. in the next two books, with someone of a similar age (or at least not so distant as to be commented on)
3. White Haven, the only one with an actual significant age gap and mainly remarkable because he physically looked twice her age at the time it went public.

I'm not seeing a clear age preference here.

Aerdan posted:

...and? My point was that you can't conclusively say that she has a thing for older men because the sample size of older men she is romantically & sexually attracted to is one. Not two. One. Later books make it clear that there was no romantic or sexual attraction involved in her relationship with Courvosier.

Kchama posted:

So despite getting a basically point-blank direct hit on the Troubadour, the Troubadour's combat capability is only minorly impaired and only a minimal amount of sacrific--- I mean crew were lost. You know, I wonder if the actual reason why ships in these books have such over-bloated crews is because he was replicating how Age of Sail ships had massive crews because they were more or less expected to lose them (and with how the crew were constantly dicked over, probably were intended to be lost). Even without detailed context, that's not really "light" damage.

quote:

Pushing that lame catchphrase, I see. I don't even know how Weber fans came to love it, as it's just so bland.

quote:

Decorated Marine Officer... so that must be why he's a good guy and not a snivelling coward or Just Plain Wrong.

Also do Marine officers usually become ambassadors?

Gnoman posted:

Going to the wiki, Troubador is a Chanson-class ship, with 3 missile tubes and three lasers in each broadside. This means that one hit took it down to one missile and two lasers working perfectly, with another missile and laser working very poorly. That's crippling until the damage is fixed, and not exactly "light" damage even once repairs are made.


The ship's details are not explicitly given in this book, but the ship loses a radar (which explicitly cripples anti-missile capability), has a missile launcher destroyed outright, loses a magazine and (presumably, given the "total loss" statement) everything in it, cripples two other weapons (one laser and one missile tube are controlled by the on mount backup crews, which is one of the reasons for large crews in the first place), and the engine is significantly damaged. When they talk about the damage not being "as bad as it could have been", that is comparing it to "the ship blew up with all hands" or "we have no offensive capacity remaining". All from a pair of hits from a totally obsolete unit. The engine damage, of course, has pretty severe repercussions later.


Personally it wouldn't be so bad except that Weber simply can not resist calling it out and shoehorning it in. As before, I contrast it with Jean Luc Picard's trademark "Make It So" - which is only used to confirm orders. If "Let's be about it" was only used in appropriate contexts, and if he didn't have other officers not only use it but constantly call Honor out as the source, it would not be nearly as grating.


Turning retired military into diplomats is one of Manticore's hats in this series. No explanation is given except for Raoul (who was explicitly chosen in part because Grayson has a navy fetish), but there's several others in the series, and it isn't hard to manufacture one if you need it.

Kchama posted:

Oh I was mostly just going by what Honor said as to how it didn't reduce their combat power by much. I kind of wonder if he didn't have the specifications in place. Since it does point out that indeed it's defensive capability was hosed, but that it didn't have serious combat power loss except for the ammo destruction.

quote:

His voice was harsh with pain, and Honor's eyes were dark as she nodded, but for all that, they both knew Troubadour had been incredibly lucky. The loss of one of her forward missile tubes and an entire magazine had hurt her offensive capability, and Radar Three's destruction left a dangerous chink in her anti-missile defenses. But her combat power was far less impaired than it might have been, and the casualties could have been much, much worse. She'd been lamed, and until the alpha node was replaced she couldn't generate a forward Warshawski sail, but she could still maneuver and fight.

mllaneza posted:

The damage was overstated by Gnoman.

Gnoman posted:

Most authors wouldn't have nailed down the details at this point, but Weber's background is in wargaming. Wargamers (and note that I count myself in this) are an odd lot, highly focused on detail. I think this is a "shading" issue - let me pull up the whole quote.


The bolded parts can be read, entirely reasonably, as meaning anything from "it is more than a scratch, but we'll deal with it" to "the ship is still a ship and not a burning wreck or a cloud of vapor, so this isn't a worst-case scenario". Weber probably meant it to be about the middle of that spectrum, while you're reading it somewhere in the lower parts. The ship has one broadside completely untouched, so she can fight on pretty well, but is practically crippled on the other.


EDIT:


This is a fair statement. I was almost certainly overstating things in reaction, but it was not deliberate.

Kchama posted:

I genuinely didn't think it was deliberate in any case. That's why I asked if Weber didn't think about the details. You bring up that he does have a background in wargaming and thinks about the details, but one of the big things in the Honorverse is that there's a LOT of issues with the details. The actual wargame had to change a lot because of the contradictions in details.

Gnoman posted:

The major screwup was a wargamer screwup through-and-through. He used one unit of measurement as the one that mattered, and just used "this sounds about right" for the ones that contribute to volume. The other changes to the wargame are more of the "these battles take place in a vacuum, without any long-term considerations that would normally constrain the captains - so we've modified things a bit to reflect those constraints" type* that are common wargame fodder.

Kchama posted:

Actually, there was stories about how they'd look up descriptions of the ships and they wouldn't actually match what Weber gave them as their loadouts. Like, for example, one ship was described as 'lightly armed for its class' but by Weber's stats was the most heavily armed ship of its class.

Kchama posted:

Actually, there was stories about how they'd look up descriptions of the ships and they wouldn't actually match what Weber gave them as their loadouts. Like, for example, one ship was described as 'lightly armed for its class' but by Weber's stats was the most heavily armed ship of its class.

Gnoman posted:

Those I haven't heard, and are probably a result of shifting ideas in his head - he nailed down *that* ship, but only had a vague notion about where it sat in the "galaxy's fighting warships" rankings.


At this point, though, we're trying to mindread somebody from thirty years ago, and that's probably going to be a fruitless endavour.

mllaneza posted:

The work done for the wargame and related fan projects found its way back into the books. The "Great Resizing" which reconciled his tonnages with his ship dimensions for example. The wargame project needed hard numbers for every ship, and those pretty much kept on as references for the books. And then it just didn't loving matter with six figures of missiles in a single salvo.

90s Cringe Rock posted:

In 2010 David Betz, a senior lecturer in war studies at King's College, London, cited Singularity Sky as a model for a proposal to undermine the Taliban's hold over Afghanistan, and strengthen the country's legitimate government, by giving every resident of the country a free mobile phone. He said it would "create a real communications space and 'let ideas find their own levels'". In Stross's novel, he noted, "the contact of the lesser developed culture with the advanced one is utterly devastating for the status quo of the former. The parallels are pretty obvious."

Kchama posted:

I wouldn't put it past Weber to not mean romantically, especially considering her eventual husband was around the same age, maybe even older, when she married him.

PupsOfWar posted:

you're reaching here
there is no indication of anything untoward between honor and courvosier at any point
you and I just agreed on the "huh, weber's books are weirdly non-horny" point a short while ago, so idk why you're pursuing this.

However, while I don't think there is a pattern of older man/younger woman relationships in weber's work, I would note that there is a pattern of superior/subordinate relationships with dubious power dynamics, which is maybe worth examining if you want to get into this

Kchama posted:

Like I said, I was making fun of how he and wrote it poorly wrote Honor's reaction to his death and used wording that you'd see for someone talking about their love interest, and even pointed out that before then I never thought anything between them.

Epicurius posted:

I don't like David Weber as an author, but I don't know of a pattern of age inappropriate romances in his books. In the Safehold books, which I know better than the Honor Harrington books, the characters who are in romantic relationships are with people near their own age, and while, sure, in the Honor books, Hamish is a lot older than Honor, this is also a series where a 101 year old and a 62 year old can have a child (and still be functional members of society, which isn't true of a lot of 101 year olds nowadays) , which suggests a certain kind of flattening of the aging process which maybe makes that sort of an age gap less remarkable than otherwise. And they're both consenting adults, and even pass the "half your age plus seven" rule, so other than the possibility of jokes about cradle robbing, I don't see the relationship as icky on age grounds.

Anshu posted:

General Battuta posted:

I think the Honor/Hamish thing happened because Honor is supposed to be like Nelson who had a genuinely scandalous relationship with some guy's wife. But Honor is too pure and morally upstanding to actually do anything that interesting.

quote:

Commander Manning paused outside the briefing room and drew a deep breath.

Manning liked Captain Yu. In a service where too many senior officers came from Legislaturist families, Yu was that rarest of birds: a self-made man. It couldn't have been easy for him, but somehow the Captain had won his way to the very brink of flag rank without forgetting what he himself had been through on the way up. He treated his officers firmly but with respect, even warmth, and he never forgot those who served him well. Thomas Theisman commanded Principality because he'd served with Captain Yu before and Yu had wanted him for the slot, and Manning had been handpicked as Thunder's exec for the same reasons. That sort of treatment earned the Captain a remarkable degree of personal loyalty and devotion, but he was only human. He had his bad days, and when a CO-any CO—was out of sorts, his subordinates trod warily.

quote:

And if the Captain had ever had reason to feel out of sorts, now was certainly the time, Manning thought as he pressed the admittance button.

"Yes?" The voice over the intercom was as courteous as ever, but it held a dangerous, flat undertone for ears which knew it well.

"Commander Manning, Sir."

The hatch opened. Manning stepped across the sill and braced to attention, and some instinct told him to do it Havenite style.

"You wanted to see me, Sir?"

"Yes. Sit down, George."

Yu pointed to a chair, and the commander relaxed just a tad at the use of his first name.

"What's the status of Tractor Five?"

"Engineering says another ten or twelve hours, Sir." Yu's face tightened, and Manning tried to keep any defensiveness out of his voice. "The components were never intended for this sort of continual power level, Captain. They have to strip it clear down to the flux core to make replacements."

quote:

"Goddamn it." Yu ran a hand through his hair in a harried gesture he never let a Masadan see, and then his free hand suddenly slammed the table top.

Manning managed not to flinch. It wasn't like the Captain to carry on, but these Masadans were enough to try the patience of a saint. The cliché was less amusing than it might have been, but the fact that the Captain was allowing himself to use the sort of language he hadn't let himself use since arriving here was a fair indication of how far he'd been pushed.

Yu smashed the table again, then sat back in his chair with a groan.

"They're idiots, George. loving idiots! We could wipe out everything Grayson has left in an hour—in fifteen minutes!—and they won't let us do it!"

"Yes, Sir," Manning said softly, and Yu shoved himself up to stalk back and forth across the briefing room like a caged tiger.

"If anyone back home had told me there were people like this anywhere in the galaxy, I'd have called him a liar to his face," Yu growled. "We've got Grayson by the balls, and all they can see is how bad they got hurt! Goddamn it, people get hurt in wars! And just because Madrigal chewed the hell out of their piss-ant navy, they're making GBS threads their drawers like they were up against the Manticoran Home Fleet!"

quote:

This time Manning was tactfully silent. Anything he said could only make it worse at this point.

No one, Captain Yu included, had been prepared for just how good Manticoran anti-missile systems had turned out to be. They'd known the RMN's electronic warfare capability was better than theirs, and they'd assumed a certain margin of superiority for their other systems as well, but the speed and accuracy of Madrigal's point defense had shocked all of them. It had turned what should have been a complete kill into something far less, and if the destroyer's defenses hadn't been overextended by her efforts to protect her consorts, she probably would have gotten out completely undamaged.

It would have been different in a sustained engagement, when their own computers could have gotten a read on Madrigal's responses and they could have shifted their firing patterns and penaid settings until they found a way through them. But they'd only had one shot each, and the destroyer had knocked down entirely too many of their missiles.

quote:

That had smarted badly enough for the "immigrants" in Thunder's crew—it had been their hardware that showed up so poorly, after all—but it had more than smarted for the Masadans. Sword Simonds had been livid as Madrigal and the two surviving Graysons raced out of their missile envelope. Manning was still astonished the Captain had managed to hang onto his temper as the sword ranted and railed at him, and despite his outward calm, Manning knew he'd been as close to murder as the exec had ever seen him when Simonds refused to order Franks to bypass Madrigal and pursue the Grayson survivors.

Simonds had practically danced with rage as he rejected Yu's suggestion. The extent to which Madrigal had degraded the ambush had not only infuriated but frightened him, and he'd known perfectly well that at least some of Franks' ships would have been exposed to her fire, however widely they dispersed, if the squadron spread out to over-fly her.

quote:

Well, of course they would have been, but the Sword's response to the threat had proven once and for all that he was no tactician. If his ships had dispersed, he might have had to write off one or two cruisers to Madrigal's missiles, but the others would have been outside the destroyer's effective engagement range. She simply wouldn't have had the reach to hit that many targets. But he'd insisted on backing Franks' decision to go in together for mutual support—and paid the price hesitant tactics almost always exacted. The Masadan ships had actually decelerated to meet Madrigal in an effort to bring their own weapons into effective range and keep them there!

quote:

It had been like a mob armed with clubs charging a man with a pulser. Madrigal's missiles had blown the cruisers Samson and Noah and the destroyer Throne right out of space as they closed, and then the Masadans entered her energy range and it only got worse. The cruiser David had survived, but she was little more than a hulk, and the destroyers Cherubim and Seraphim had been crippled before they ever got into their energy range.

Of course, the clubs had had their own turn after that. Crude as Masadan energy weapons were, there'd simply been too many of them for her, and they'd battered her to bits. But even after she'd been mortally wounded, Madrigal had set her teeth in the destroyers Archangel and Angel. She'd pounded them until she didn't have a single weapon left, and she'd taken Archangel with her. Of the entire squadron which had closed with her, only the cruiser Solomon and the destroyer Dominion remained combat effective . . . and, of course, Franks' decision to slow for the suicidal engagement meant the surviving Graysons had escaped.

It shouldn't have mattered. If nothing else, what Madrigal had done should have made Simonds even more confident. If a destroyer could wreak that kind of carnage, what did he think Thunder could do?!

quote:

"Do you know what that insufferable little prick said to me?" Yu whirled to face his exec, one finger pointed like a pistol, and his eyes blazed. "He told me—told me, drat him!—that if I hadn't lied to him about my ship's capabilities, he might be more inclined to listen to me now!" A snarl quivered in the Captain's throat. "What the gently caress does he expect is going to happen when his frigging 'admirals' have their heads so far up their asses they have to pipe in air through their navels?!"

quote:

Manning maintained his silence and concentrated on looking properly sympathetic, and Yu's lips worked as if he wanted to spit on the decksole. Then his shoulders slumped, and he sank back into his chair.

"God, I wish the Staff had found someone else to dump this on!" he sighed, but the fury had left his voice. Manning understood. The Captain had needed to work it out of his system, and for that he had to yell at one of his own.

"Well," Yu said finally, "if they insist on being stupid, I suppose there's nothing we can do but try to minimize the consequences. There are times I could just about kill Valentine, but if this weren't so completely unnecessary, I might almost admire the cleverness of it. I don't think anyone else ever even considered towing LACs through hyper space."

"Yes, Sir. On the other hand, they couldn't have done it with their own tractors or hyper generators. I guess by the time you've got the technical ability, you've figured out how to build good enough ships that you don't need to use it."

"Um." Yu inhaled deeply and closed his eyes for a moment. Stupid as he thought the whole idea was, he also knew that only his chief engineer's suggestion had kept the Masadans going at all.

quote:

They'd flatly refused to attack Grayson with their remaining combat strength in Yeltsin. As near as Yu could figure out, they were afraid Manticore might have slipped some sort of superweapon to the Graysons. That was the stupidest idea they'd had yet, but perhaps it shouldn't be so easy to blame them for it. They'd never seen a modern warship in action before, and what Madrigal had done to their antiquated fleet terrified them. Intellectually, they had to know Thunder and Principality were many times as powerful as Madrigal had been, but they'd never seen "their" two modern ships in action. Their capabilities weren't quite real to them . . . and Yu's credibility had been damaged by Madrigal's escape from the ambush, anyway.

quote:

For one whole day, Simonds had been adamant about the need to suspend all operations and seek a negotiated settlement. Yu didn't think Masada had a hope in hell of pulling that off after their sneak attack and Madrigal's destruction, but the sword had dug his heels in and insisted he simply didn't have the tonnage in Yeltsin to continue.

That was when Commander Valentine made his suggestion, and Yu didn't know whether to strangle his engineer or kiss him. It had wasted three days already, and Tractor Five's breakdown was going to stretch that still further, but it had gotten Simonds to agree, if only hesitantly, to press forward.

quote:

Valentine had pointed out that both Thunder and Principality had far more powerful hyper generators than any Masadan starship. In fact, their generators were powerful enough to extend their translation fields over six kilometers beyond their own hulls if he redlined them. That meant that if they translated from rest, they could take anything within six kilometers with them when they did. And that meant that if Masadan LACs clustered closely enough around them, they could boost the lighter vessels into hyper space.

Normally, that would have been little more than an interesting parlor trick, but Valentine had taken the entire idea one stage further. No LAC crew could survive the sort of acceleration ships routinely pulled in hyper for the simple reason that their inertial compensator would pack up the instant they tried it. But if they took the entire crew off and removed or secured all loose gear, Valentine suggested, there was no reason the ships themselves couldn't take the acceleration on the end of a tractor beam.

Yu had thought he was out of his mind, but the engineer had pulled up the numbers on his terminal and demonstrated the theoretical possibility. Simonds had jumped at it, and to Yu's considerable surprise, it had worked.

So far, they'd lost only two of the tiny ships. The LACs were just big enough it took three tractors to zone each of them, and one tractor had lost lock during acceleration. That LAC had simply snapped in half; the second had survived the journey only to have its crew find a ragged, three-meter hole torn half the length of their ship where a twelve-ton pressure tank had come adrift and crashed aft like an ungainly cannonball.

quote:

Of course, the towing ships had been crowded almost beyond endurance by packing in the crews who couldn't survive aboard their own ships and, as Manning had said, the strain on their tractors had been enormous. But it had worked—and Yu had found Thunder and Principality playing tugboat back and forth between Endicott and Yeltsin's Star.

It was a short hop, barely twelve hours either way for a modern warship, even towing LACs behind her, but there were only two vessels capable of pulling it off, and they could tow only three LACs at a time: two behind Thunder and one behind Principality. They simply didn't have enough tractors to move more than that. In three days, they'd transferred eighteen of Masada's twenty LACs to Yeltsin—well, sixteen, discounting the two they'd lost. This final trip by Thunder would move the last of them, and if he couldn't see that their firepower afforded any particular tactical advantage, it seemed to have bolstered the Masadans' confidence, so perhaps it hadn't been an entire waste.

quote:

"I need to talk to the Ambassador," he said suddenly, and Manning's eyebrows rose at the apparent non sequitur. "About getting out from under Simonds' thumb," Yu clarified. "I know we have to maintain the fiction that this is a purely Masadan operation, but if I can give them a good, hard push just once, we can tie this whole thing up in a couple of hours."

"Yes, Sir." Manning felt oddly moved by his captain's openness. It wasn't the sort of thing one normally encountered in the People's Navy.

"Maybe repairing Tractor Five will give me enough time ground-side," Yu mused. "It'll have to be face-to-face; I don't trust our com links."

Actually, Manning knew, the Captain didn't trust his com officer, since that was one of the slots now filled by a Masadan.

"I understand, Sir."

"Good." Yu rubbed his face, then straightened. "Sorry I screamed at you, George. You were just handy."

"That's what execs are for, Sir," Manning grinned, not adding that few other captains would have apologized for using an exec for one of his designed functions.

"Yeah, maybe." Yu managed a smile. "And at least this will be the last tow trip."

"Yes, Sir. And Commander Theisman will keep an eye on things in Yeltsin till we get back."

"Better him than that rear end in a top hat Franks," Yu growled.

quote:

Sword of the Faithful Matthew Simonds knocked on the door and walked through it into the palatially furnished room. His brother, Chief Elder Thomas Simonds of the Faithful of the Church of Humanity Unchained, looked up, and his wizened face was not encouraging. Senior Elder Huggins was seated beside Thomas, and he looked even less encouraging.

Deacon Ronald Sands sat opposite Huggins. Sands was one of the youngest men ever to attain the rank of deacon, and his face was much less thunderous than his seniors'. Part of that was probably because he was so junior to them, but Sword Simonds suspected most of it was because Masada's spy master was smarter than either of them and knew it.

Cloth rustled, and he turned his head to see his brother's junior wife. He couldn't recall her name, and she wore the traditional form-shrouding dress of a Masadan woman, but her face was unveiled, and the Sword suppressed a grin as he suddenly realized that at least a portion of Huggins' obvious anger was directed at that shocking breach of propriety. Thomas had always been vain about his virility, and it had pandered to his amour propre to take a wife barely eighteen T-years of age. He already had six others, and Matthew doubted he still had the endurance to mount any of them, but Thomas had taken to flaunting his new prize's beauty whenever his associates met in his home.

The practice drove Huggins berserk—which was one reason Thomas did it. Had the wench belonged to anyone else, the fire-and-brimstone elder would have sent her to the post for a public flogging prefaced by a few pointed words on the laxity of the man who allowed his wife to behave in such ungodly fashion. If the man in question had been unimportant enough, he might even have called for his stoning. As it was, he had to pretend he hadn't noticed.

The sword advanced across the carpet, ignoring her presence, and sat in the chair at the foot of the long table. The appearance of a tribunal, with himself in the role of the accused, was not, he was certain, a coincidence.

"So you're here." Thomas' voice was creaky with age, for he was the eldest child of Tobias Simonds' first wife, while Matthew was the second son of their father's fourth wife.

"Of course I am." Matthew was well aware of the danger in which he stood, but if he showed any consciousness of his vulnerability his enemies would close in like a rathound pack pulling down a Masadan antelope.

"I'm gratified to see you can follow at least some orders," Huggins snapped. The rancorous elder considered himself the sword's main competition for the Chief Elder's chair, and Matthew turned to him, ready to strike back, but Thomas' raised hand had already rebuked the elder. So. At least his brother wasn't yet ready to cut him totally adrift.

"Peace, Brother," the Chief Elder said to Huggins. "We are all about God's Work, here. Let there be no recriminations."

His wife moved silently about the table, refilling their glasses, then vanished as a jerk of his head banished her back to the women's quarters. Huggins seemed to relax just a bit as she disappeared, and he forced a smile.

"I stand rebuked, Chief Elder. Forgive me, Sword Simonds. Our situation is enough to try even Saint Austin's Faith."

"Indeed it is, Elder Huggins," the sword said, with just as much false graciousness as Huggins, "and I can't deny that, as commander of our military, the responsibility for straightening that situation out is mine."

"Perhaps so," his brother said impatiently, "but it was no more of your making than ours—except, perhaps, in that you supported that infidel's plans." The Chief Elder's jaw worked, and his head seemed to squat lower on his shoulders.

"In fairness to Sword Simonds," Sands put in in the diffident tone he always assumed before his superiors, "Yu's arguments were convincing. And according to my sources, they were generally sincere, as well. His motives were his own, of course, but he truly believed he had the capabilities he claimed."

Huggins snorted, but no one disputed Sands. The Masadan theocracy had gone to great lengths to deny its "ally" any participation in its own covert activities, and everyone in this room knew how extensive Sands' network was.

"Nonetheless, we're in serious trouble because we listened to him." The Chief Elder gave his brother a sharp glance. "Do you think he's right about his ability to destroy what's left of the Apostate fleet?"

"Of course he is," the sword said. "He overestimated Jericho's initial effectiveness, but my own people in his tactical section assure me his fundamental assessments are correct. If a single destroyer could do so much damage to our fleet, Thunder and Principality together could make mincemeat of the Apostate."

Matthew was aware that Huggins no longer trusted Yu—or anyone who agreed with him, for that matter—a millimeter. Yet what he'd just said was self-evidently true . . . and he'd avoided mentioning what those same people of his in Yu's tactical section had had to say about his own decision to support Franks' tactics in Yeltsin. He hadn't been too happy to hear it himself, but if he punished them for it, they would almost certainly start telling him what he wanted to hear, not what they truly thought.

"Deacon Sands? Do you agree?"

"I'm not a military man, Chief Elder, but, yes. Our own sources had already indicated that Manticoran systems are better than those of Haven, but their margin of superiority is vastly less than Thunder's superiority to anything the Apostate have."

"So we can let him proceed if we must?" the Chief Elder pressed.

"I don't see any option but to let him if Maccabeus fails," Sands said unflinchingly. "In that event, only a military solution can save us. And with all due respect, time is running out. Maccabeus wasn't able to tell us if the Manticoran escort was returning, but we must assume it will be back within days. One way or the other, we must control both planets by that time."

"But Maccabeus is our best hope." Huggins shot a venomous glance at the sword. "Your operations were supposed to support him, Sword Simonds. They were supposed to be a pretext, not a serious attempt at conquest!"

quote:

"With all respect, Elder Huggins," Matthew began hotly, "that—"

"Peace, Brothers!" The Chief Elder rapped a bony knuckle on the table and glared at them both until they sank back into their chairs, then turned his basilisk gaze on Huggins. "We're all aware of what was supposed to happen, Brother. Unfortunately, we couldn't exactly tell the Havenites that, nor could we proceed without their support in case Maccabeus failed. God has not yet decided our efforts merit His Blessing, but neither has He condemned us to failure. There are two strings to our bow, and neither has snapped yet."

Huggins glowered for a moment, then bobbed his head stiffly. This time he didn't even pretend to apologize to the sword.

"Very well." Thomas turned back to his brother. "How much longer can you stall direct military action without arousing Haven's suspicions?"

"No more than another thirty or forty hours. Thunder's tractor damage buys us a little time, but once all of our LACs are in Yeltsin, we'll either have to move or admit we have no intention of doing so."

"And your last contact with Maccabeus?"

"Cherubim lagged far enough behind on our fourth strike to speak with his courier. At that time, Maccabeus believed there was still too much popular support for the current regime, despite our attacks. We've been unable to contact him since, of course, but he indicated that he was prepared to move if public morale began to crack, and Jericho must have weakened it further."

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"Do you concur, Deacon Sands?"

"I do. Of course, we can't know how much it's weakened. Our own losses and the fact that any of their ships escaped may have an offsetting effect. On the other hand, they now know that we have at least some modern vessels, and the Apostate media has no Synod of Censors. We can assume, I think, that at least some accounts of the battle—and the odds they face—have found their way into the planetary news net."

"Does Maccabeus know what strength we have?" Huggins demanded.

"No," Sands said. "He and Jericho were completely compartmentalized for operational security. Given his position under the current regime, however, he must know that what we have outclasses anything in the Apostate navy."

"That's true," Elder Simonds mused, then inhaled deeply. "Very well, Brothers, I think we have reached our moment of decision. Maccabeus remains our best hope. If he can secure control of Grayson by domestic means, we'll be in a far better position to stave off further Manticoran intervention. No doubt they'll demand steep reparations, and I am prepared even to bend my neck to publicly apologize for our 'accidental' attack on a ship we didn't realize wasn't Apostate-built, but the destruction of any local regime to support their aims in the region should cause them to cut their losses. And, given their traditional foreign policy, it's unlikely they'll have the will and courage to conquer us to gain the base they desire. Most importantly, if Maccabeus succeeds, we can gain gradual control of Grayson without further overt military action, which means we will no longer need Haven, either, so I think we must delay Thunder's return to Yeltsin for at least one more day to give him time.

"Nonetheless, we must also face the possibility that he will fail—or, at any rate, require a further demonstration of the hopelessness of the Apostate military position to succeed."

He paused and looked at his brother.

"Bearing all of this in mind, Sword Simonds, I hereby direct you to begin military operations to reduce the Apostate navy, followed, if necessary, by demonstration nuclear strikes on their less important cities, to create the conditions for Maccabeus' success. You will begin those operations within twelve hours of your return to Yeltsin with the last of our LACs."

He looked around the table, his rheumy old eyes flat as a snake's.

"Is there any disagreement with my directions?"

Kchama posted:

What's a flux core, anyways?

No judgement, I just dunno what it is but I assume it's something somebody knows.

quote:

So a destroyer was able completely stop a Light Cruiser and Battlecruiser with their anti-missile and only suffered at all because it was trying to cover an entire fleet at the same time. This bodes really ill for Haven, who basically cannot expect to win a real fight right now as a result. The destroyer would have lost eventually but would have been, ironically, a lot bigger threat if it had been alone and not needed to protect a bunch of idiots in bad ships.


This is fair, since, actually. The Madrigal had outperformed by a ton so Simonds has every right to be afraid of a ship that the two bigger ships he had been told were more advanced and were supposedly easily capable of defeated had trouble against, even if it was for only a surprise volley. But it was still a surprise volley and by that nature should have been a good deal more dangerous than a regular volley, and had been, as stated above, swatted down.


I'm not sure WHY this was such a 'no tactician' move, to be honest. Madrigal had been shown to be a much bigger threat than the two fleeing ships and getting rid of it was a very valid manuever considering if the two cruisers weren't able to defeat it quickly enough it would have a good feast on the ships since as a destroyer, much less a Manticorean destroyer, it would have had a good chance to catch them and pick them off from behind, whereas at least focusing the Madrigal down took out the only real threat to their ambitions in the system. If they hadn't sat on their hands afterwards they could have easily just completed all of their objectives and gone home happy.


I mean, the Thunder struggled to hit the single destroyer that was having to protect an entire fleet at the same time, so maybe that's why he was so hesitant. The destroyer seemed relatively superior.

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I dunno why they didn't just make the two Haven ships do the fighting if they were so convinced there's a Manticorean ship out there.

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A pretext to what? This is basically conquest either way. Did you guys seriously think that the Graysons would roll over to Masada? Like the moment this Maccabeus reveals that he's in cahoots with Masada he's dead, no matter how highly ranked he is, and it's going to be obvious if Masada is going to get anything of value out of this dumb operation. Conquest is basically all they have at this point.

General Battuta posted:

I think the Honor/Hamish thing happened because Honor is supposed to be like Nelson who had a genuinely scandalous relationship with some guy's wife. But Honor is too pure and morally upstanding to actually do anything that interesting.

Gnoman posted:

This is pretty obviously technobabble that's just specific enough not to sound like meaningless nonsense but vague enough that you aren't accidentally calling something out.

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The text is clear about why this happens, but the why of the why isn't fully explained. This is one of those areas where Weber just assumed the audience would follow it.

The short of it is, in a one-on-one fight with Madrigal, either Havenite ship would have won handily. The only reason they did not do so was because of the exact scenario of the ambush - they were able to fire a single salvo (albeit one that was twice the size of what they'd throw in a standard engagement) against an entire fleet. They did so in almost complete ignorance of the capabilities of the only ship in that fleet that mattered - none of the Grayson ships had a chance of stopping any of the fire. They know Manticore's ahead of them, but they don't know how much. So they assume what looks like a reasonable margin of inferiority, and assign their missiles based on that. Unfortunately, Madrigal's better than they thought, and is able to blunt a lot of their fire. They'd have crippled or killed her if they'd only targeted her, but they don't want to shoot only at Madrigal, because that wastes their advantage. If they don't maul the Graysons, then it turns into a straight up Grayson-Masada naval fight where the Masadans (who Haven wants to win) have only marginal advantage.

So the ambush is less successful than they hoped, but the Grayson fleet is damaged, and Madrigal's crippled enough that the Masadans can evade most of her weapons range. This means that the Masadans can go around Madrigal, defeat the Grayson Navy in detail, and then watch the two "immigrant" ships eventually move around and take Madrigal out. War's over - Masadan victory. Instead, they ignore the fleet they can kill to bum rush the ship they're mad at, and which outclasses them massively. They manage to kill her, but only after taking losses that eliminate their ability to destroy the fleet that was their objective in the first place.

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Leaving the Masadans at home and fighting with just the "immigrant" ships would be a massive slap in Masada's face, and destroy any plausible deniability that Haven's not directly involved. It would immediately become a "Haven has attacked and destroyed Manticoran ships in time of peace during the conquest of a neutral star system", which is the worst of all possible worlds for Haven.

quote:

Masada's plan here is actually very good. Maccabeus isn't going to simply announce "HA! I AM MASADAN SPY. I SURRENDER GRAYSON IN THE NAME OF MASADA. HA!". He's going to somehow take over the government, "solve" the impending crisis and get rid of the Masadan invaders, pull out of the Manticoran alliance, and then turn Grayson into Masada by slow "reform". This not only gives them their holy planet, but does so in a way that makes it all but impossible for Manticore (or any other Grayson allies) to dispute said conquest without looking like a conquistador - the legitimate head of the planet considering alliance will have rejected said alliance with the support of Grayson's people. This is explicit in this chapter's text, even though it doesn't yet say who Maccabeus is or how he's going to take power. For ways to take over the planet and get away with it, this one is hard to beat.

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It is Haven who has the lovely plan here. Their plausible deniability isn't anywhere close to plausible enough, and they think Masada's going for simple military conquest. Even without a formal treaty, Manticore wouldn't look like a conqueror intervening in that scenario - rather, they'd be heroically riding to the rescue -, and nobody would doubt that Haven was involved in the conquest in the first place. Even if that doesn't lead immediately to war because Manticore isn't ready, it still gives Manticore a ton of ammunition in the all-important propaganda war. If war does break out immediately, all you're doing is effectively guaranteeing that you start it out with a resounding defeat.

Safety Biscuits posted:

Nelson was bonking one Lady Emma Hamilton, including living with her and her husband, leaving his wife for her, and doctoring their daughter's birth certificate so they could pretend he was only the godfather. Haven't read any Weber but I doubt Honor dies anything half so entertaining.

Kchama posted:

The Graysons only had a heavily damaged Light Cruiser and an undamaged Destroyer, versus a mildly damaged Light Cruiser and a mildly damaged Destroyer. If the 'immigrants' had helped more the Graysons should have been much more screwed. I mean, I don't think they helped any with the Madrigal after the first salvos and it doesn't specify why. Maybe Simonds refused to let them help? No idea.

Also another issue is if they had tried to avoid the Madrigal to attack the fleeing ships, if the 'immigrants' didn't help out immediately the Madrigal would have gotten to them before they could catch the fleeing Graysons and it would have been extremely over for them, which seems to be the rationale for why they decided to smash the Madrigal first, because they were afraid of what it could do if they didn't.

They might not have been wrong. The real tactical blunder was not letting the immigrant ships help more, as the Graysons already had the information that the Masadans had at least a heavy cruiser, so you'd want to shoot the messenger very quickly. So without the 'immigrant ships' helping, it does seem suicidal not to wipe out the Madrigal first. But with the 'immigrants' helping the Madrigal would have been quickly destroyed and the Graysons would have been able to be run down before they could pass news along.

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Oh, I didn't actually mean 'leave the Masadans home'. I just meant have them be a bigger part of the ambush instead of sticking to the shadows because it seems pretty clear that they're out in the sticks enough that there's not going to be any clarity, and the moment they helped in the ambush it became instantly clear that Masada somehow got its hands on modern cruisers anyways, so it'd be more of a 'in for a penny, in for a pound' situation.

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I feel like the issue of the plan is how much it relies on a lot of 'somehows'. Even if Maccabeus was high up in the government, 'somehow' take over the government is never a plan that you can rely on. And looking up the actual plan, Masada's invasion doesn't really seem SUPER relevant to it, or could have been better timed.

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To be totally fair to Haven, they think Masada wants a military conquest because they've been trying for one forever and, to boot, that's what they told Haven the plan is. So I can't actually fault Haven for doing things in accordance to what they were told the plan was, and Yu makes it clear that Haven's actually trying to be good allies here and help Masada with their stated objective, and Masada completely refusing to actually commit out of what looks like fear completely pisses him off.

Gnoman posted:

I'm not sure if the issue here is Weber's sparse descriptions or that this sort of Newtonian movement can be really tricky to visualize from text alone. Let me try to break it down more clearly.

The plan is to use the main Masadan fleet to draw the Graysons straight into the fire of the ambushing battlecruiser and destroyer. This is such a classic tactic that it has a name - feigned retreat into L-shaped ambush.

The Masadan fleet, sans the "immigrant" ships, is heading in one direction at an acceleration of at least 4.9 kilometers per second per second and a velocity of over .46c. The Grayson fleet is on a chasing course (they "turned and ran" when they picked up the intercepting fleet) at unstated acceleration, but they're explicitly going to be going at over .5c at the ambush point. The two immigrant ships are sitting three million kilometers from the Grayson fleet at the time of ambush with zero acceleration and zero velocity. This allows the two ambushing units to avoid detection, but it means that they are effectively out of the fight once they get their one punch in - maximum acceleration for a Sultan-class battlecruiser (according to the Wiki, I know it is in this book somewhere but I don't feel like digging for it) is 489 gravities which translates to 4.7 kilometers per second per second (acceleration in this universe is restricted by size, and Thunder is far larger than the Masadan ships, which makes it slower despite being much more modern). So getting to the same speed the Graysons are already going would take almost 32000 seconds, or almost eight hours, and that's ignoring the fact that the ships are also accelerating. THey'd catch the Grayson cripples eventually, but there's no chance that they can get there in time to affect the battle unless the rest of the Masadan fleet goes full evasive. So they're effectively out of the fight - exisitng velocity alone will have carried the other ships far away.

Now, we look at Madrigal. Damage reduces her to 4.6 kp/s/s, while the mostly undamaged Masadans can do at least 4.9. At this point, the Grayson ships are headed directly away from the Masadans, and Madrigal is turning to engage. This means that the Masadans are faster by a signficiant margin. This is why Yu estimates that Madrigal would only be able to engage one cruiser, or possibly 2, out of the 4 cruisers and 6 destroyers present, leaving the other 2 and 6 to engage the Graysons with crushing superiority - because Madrigal's now in effectively the same position that Thunder and Principality were for the ambush. Instead, the Masadans slow down to engage, allowing Madrigal to destroy two cruisers and two destroyers while crippling 1 cruiser and 3 destroyers. Meanwhile, slowing down to fight gave the Graysons time to get under cover of the orbital defenses, which are explicitly stated to be quite formidable for the tech base. This should not matter, because the two "immigrant" ships can still take them, but the Masadans are faking panic to stall for their real plan.


You're right - that would have made the ambush more effective. However, remember that Yu was lying his rear end off when he told the Masadans he thought Madrigal would keep out - he fully expected Raoul to intervene. Also remember that they know Manticore's sensors are better than they thought, but have no idea how much better. They had every reason to believe that Madrigal might have picked up on the trap in time to avoid it - which would allow Yanakov and Raoul to turn the fight into a cat-and-mouse game instead of the single knockout blow he was counting on.

quote:

I'll leave further discussion of this until we see who Maccabeus is and how he intends to take over (I ask people to be constrained in my LR thread if any discussion ever happens there, only right to apply the same standard here), but for now remember that these are religious zealots who literally expect God to provide.


My point was that Haven has no endgame here. I literally cannot see a scenario where they triumph and Manticore doesn't simply roll in, blow everybody out of space, conquer both planets, and blast "Haven Did It!" through every media outlet in the galaxy. Maybe this is supposed to be a case of Haven underestimating Manticore's resolve as in last book, but at this point that feels like a stupid mistake to make.

Kchama posted:

That's true, though the moment they caught the Madrigal in the trap they should have taken advantage of it. At the same time, Yu was tsking at Simonds for being hesitant when he didn't even bother getting into the fight to help out and save the rest.

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Also I'm not sure how winning here would have messed up the Masadan plan. Unless they were always going to let the Grayson Navy go. Like, Yu's not wrong that they're acting like total idiots. They really should not be telling Haven one thing and wanting something else completely.

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Hmm looking at it one thing does Yu erver try to commit his ships to it? It's depicted as there being a decent amount of time between the Madrigal stopping and the actual fight happening, as there's enough time for them to have a discussion on what to do and it doesn't seem like sending the Havenite ships in with the Masadan ships would have caused any issues, since they were all stopped at the time anyways and, unless I'm misreading, the Grayson fleet + Madrigal got out of the Masadan fleet missile range. So unless it's just leaving out Simonds refusing Yu's help at all, then.... I dunno. Simonds's entire secret plan just kind of makes everything difficult because not even this was a fatal mistake if it wasn't for Simonds demanding delays. They had a very weird window of opportunity for anything if they wanted to get it done before the Manticorean alliance happened.

Gnoman posted:

The point is that intervening after the ambush would have been physically impossible for Yu's ships. The described geometry means that there's no way for them to get to the fight before it is all over.

quote:

From what we've seen so far, the Masadan plan is "crush the Grayson navy to create a panic so our puppet can take over", with "should our puppet fail to take over, or prove faithless, we simply conquer". The brutal losses they took give an excuse to hang back, but what they wanted was the crisis. As for why the Masadans are telling Haven one thing and doing another, this is because the Masadans are trying to exploit and scam Haven. They're allowing Haven to think that Masada is the tool, when they're convinced that Masada is actually in control and Haven is the tool. More of that "God Almighty is in our corner, we cannot fail" arrogance, but it feels really real.

quote:

The Havenite ships and the Masadan ships, after the ambush, are very far away from each other. It is implied that there's enough time for radio consult, but that's still far less than the probably hours that actually joining up would take. As for why this isn't discussed on the page, I think Weber was really enamored of the image of Madrigal turning around to make her last stand, then giving us an entire chapter waiting to see how that turned out. This is another reason why having Harrington get in contact with Grayson in the last chapter was an error - not only does it (as you mentioned) remove the tension of her attacking the wrong target, not including it would have heightened the tension by making it possible that they'd already lost the war.

Gnoman posted:

Broke a quote tag in there.



As I said earlier, I'm not sure if this is Weber's fault for being really bad at describing it, or just a consequence of "this is 3d vector mechanics on a huge field, and humans tend not to be good at it". It is quite possibly both.