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When I'm not tapped of all creative spirit by my day job or cripplingly depressed or spending hours on video games I've been remixing and rewriting the series from Mission of Honor onwards. Basically the whole Solarian League arc. There's a lot that can be cut, and I figured out some ways to get the Solarians back into the 'interesting and novel opponents' zone without introducing yet another layer of super missiles.
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Mar 22, 2020 19:56
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 16:23 |
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I'll go one better and post what I've got once I've reached a good battle or somesuch. Maybe once I hit Space Pearl Harbor. My basic principles so far: -The Solarians are still technologically inferior to Manticore in the area of 'kill it with missiles', but have tactical strengths in other areas which let them deliver their own surprises, including a far superior understanding of hyperspace and Warshawski sails, wedge fuckery, and tremendously powerful AI. -This is because Solarian military doctrine is oriented around system defense against relativistic impactors, and, offensively, around punishing Eridani Edict offenders by ramming huge walls of dreadnoughts into their core space. This requires a lot of survivability in the face of unexpected and novel defenses. The SLN is a 'simulator navy', which has its disadvantages in terms of real-world experience - but it also means they have a huge library of untested tactics and weird one-off technologies that were procured, deployed, and then canceled a hundred years ago as part of some briefly ascendant philosophy of warfighting. -The League's military establishment is aware of basic facts from the earlier Honor Harrington books, because it's clear they did have observers at some of these battles. Impeller signatures are incredibly easy to detect. You just need one freighter watching the Battle of Manticore to confirm the existence of multi-drive missiles and very long engagement ranges. ECM emissions would also be at the top of their list for collection. This doesn't mean they've done anything *about* that intelligence yet, but it's available. Sure, the SLN as Weber's written it is hidebound, but even if it's totally consumed by bureaucratic infighting, intelligence that could justify new procurement is a very powerful bureaucratic weapon. -Strategically and diplomatically, this is a war between Manticore and the Solarian League Navy as a bureaucratic organization, rather than the League as a whole. The SLN's absolute imperative is to maintain its posture of deterrence as unchallenged enforcer of the Eridani Edict, which means *any* unanswered military defeat is, in their eyes, opening the door to galaxy-wide chaos. They genuinely believe that unilateral Solarian military superiority is necessary for civilization to continue, and that this unilateral superiority must be signaled and oversignaled. They are determined to win the conflict using the military and political resources they have, without drawing in the huge System Defense Forces belonging to the Core World member nations. -Manticore loses the war if they get the League's member nations involved. This is not because individual Core Worlds can necessarily defeat Manticore in battle, but because their economic and technological output is so huge. Once an individual Core World is pissed off at Manticore, it will call directly on its allies to impose diplomatic sanctions and commerce lockdown, followed (eventually) by military action. The League legislature may be ineffective, since Beowulf can veto even the slightest censure against Manticore, but once the member worlds see themselves as involved, they'll bypass the League and act on their own. Manticore as a nation depends on external trade. The League doesn't. The Core Worlds will happily trade with each other and the rest of the League while freezing Manticore out. -The story can't be a series of meetings. It's a soap opera. Honor needs some personal drama. Her whole appeal is her fundamental righteousness, and I think people read these books for the catharsis (no matter how silly and simplistic) of Honor staggering under unjust, vindictive public treatment and then rallying to exonerate herself (and win a big space battle.) Similarly, every other character Honor meets can't just intuit right away that she's unimpeachable. -Nimitz is an alien. If Honor's got to be empathically aware of people's feelings on top of all her other advantages, it's only through the relay of this alien. This bond needs to create problems as well as solve them. How do you negotiate with a foreign head of state when you're acutely aware of all the emotions that person is repressing? When you start losing the distinction between her resentment and your own? There are a bunch of other unexamined aspects of her personal life that can be turned into drama. What if Mesa, through a Beowulfan front, offers a regenerative therapy for Honor's wife? Would Lady Emily be willing to accept treatment, when she must be an icon and advocate for the permanently disabled in a society that's used to waving disabilities away with regen? If she did accept (after much guilt and angst) how would she react when Mesa leaked the origin of the treatment - and Honor's ancestry as a Mesan supergenetic superwoman? -Grayson's economy crashes after years of wartime spending. Just fuckin dies. Go invest in some infrastructure on your poison planet instead of superdreadnoughts. -Delete or minimize everything that's coming in from the side series. This is supposed to be a main series sequel to At All Costs. Nothing about the Maya Sector or Victor Cachat's sexual predilections or 'seccies' or whatever's happening on Torch or the personal life of Abigail Hearns. -At this point in the series, although it happened in a side book, Honor Harrington has put on record her plan to destroy the entire Solarian League. Storm from the Shadows posted:"But even that won't be enough," Honor continued. "We can blow up Solarian fleets every Tuesday for the next twenty years without delivering a genuine knockout blow to something the size of the League. The only way to actually defeat it—and to make sure that we've put a stake through its heart and it doesn't just go away, build a new fleet, and then come back for vengeance a few years down the road—is to destroy it." She goes on to outline her plan for the political destruction of the entire League, the largest, oldest, and most peaceful political system in human history. Bear in mind that at this point all that's happened is an SLN fleet blowing up three Manticoran destroyers over a misunderstanding. Nothing else. This is a supervillain speech. Holy poo poo I just typed a lot of words 
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Mar 23, 2020 15:55
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I already have a day job writing books about how colonialism is terrible. This is just fanfic to relax. e: Don't get me wrong colonialism is still bad General Battuta fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Mar 24, 2020 |
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Mar 24, 2020 14:33
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I think the League's foreign policy (such as it is) is clearly one of rapacious corporate pillage of periphery states, with economic absorption followed by political integration. They can't really run an extraction economy because space is just too absurdly full of stuff to make extracting material from distant colonies worth it, but they can still undercut all local production and turn the whole planet into the equivalent of Amazon.com warehouse workers. That's bad. I don't think it is good. It is clear that the Office of Frontier Security is suffering from total corporate capture and needs to go.
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Mar 24, 2020 19:32
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This War Will Destabilize The Entire Solarian League And Set Off A Galactic Shockwave Of Anti-Imperialist Anti-Manticore Sentiment Leading To A Catastrophic Period of Balkanization And Relativistic Genocide vs. No It Won’t
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Mar 26, 2020 21:18
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Actually a real problem I’m having is how comically easy it would be for Manticore to back down and get a negotiated settlement. You need to play up the Mesan manipulation and the League’s concerns about their deterrence posture to keep Manticore from growing a brain and just saying “let’s call it even and take this to court.”
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Mar 26, 2020 21:28
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The Solarian League plays the narrative role of Reginald Houseman writ very large.
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Mar 27, 2020 01:37
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Gnoman posted:An argument that the Solarians are being artificially stupid is a defensible one. An argument that "Oh, the only reason that Solarian fleets keep getting blown up while attacking Manticoran planets is that the Manticorans are being aggressive" is not. I agree, mostly, but what I keep coming back to is that the first choice to escalate was Manticore's. A Solarian officer blows up a bunch of your ships: that's really bad. (Imagine it kind of like the US shooting down Iran Air 655. Completely unprovoked murder based on misinterpreted data.) So how do you react? Send an extremely angry diplomatic note? This is probably the reasonable thing to do. You are in a life and death war with a suddenly resurgent opponent (Haven), you can't afford to provoke the giant gorilla who takes up 99% of the room. Get an apology and reparations. Send a bunch of warships to the scene, request all the sensor logs and access to the 'crime scene'? Yeah, I can buy that. It's a strong response to a local problem, it might turn into shooting, but it doesn't really require the other side to escalate. If the Solarians do come at you, record everything, make a big fuss, threaten trade sanctions. Do the above, plus demand the responsible officer's extradition immediately, at gunpoint? This is probably starting to cross into 'unreasonable' territory. Extraditions are a process handled by law. Even if you strongly believe this Josef Byng guy needs to face The Queen's Justice or an impartial tribunal, you should let the Solarians either hand him over or (as per book stereotype) protect him and put all the blame on you, at which point you pull your ambassadors, your trade, whatever it takes. I think this is roughly the event horizon of reasonable behavior. What the Manticorans actually do is send warships to the scene, demand that the Solarian crews abandon all their ships and turn them over to Manticore until a Manticoran tribunal has decided who is guilty, and then, as part of the same message, without waiting for any response, tell the Solarians that if they refuse to meet these conditions they will be shot and killed until they comply The Solarians turn on their engines, and before even waiting to see what they do, the Manticorans tell them that if they either attack or attempt to flee they will all be killed! This is a direct quote from the character's internal monologue, you know, rendered in Genre Thought Italics: "So if we can't convince them to stop and begin immediately decelerating themselves, I'll have no choice but to take them all out before they pull out of range." I mean, look at that! "If the Solarians won't surrender to me, I'll have to kill them all!" Would it be so disastrous if some of these Solarian ships left? Would it do any real harm to anyone? Then, when the Solarians do see fit to come out and fight, the Manticorans blow away the Solarian flagship. They don't fire a bunch of missiles with unarmed warheads to demonstrate how trivial it is for them to punch through the Solarian defenses, or spread out fire to damage a number of ships, or launch on some random asteroid to demonstrate their insuperable range advantage. They just execute the Solarians! This is not the behavior of a military under reasonable civilian control, operating as an instrument of state policy. This is just vigilante revenge killing of thousands of people. Everything after that is a consequence of this decision. The Manticoran commander (Michelle Henke) could have averted the entire war here if she'd just let her diplomats and civilian leaders do their work. I'm not surprised the Solarian bureaucrat-leaders are stunned and bewildered by Manticore's behavior. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Mar 27, 2020 |
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Mar 27, 2020 06:43
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Gnoman posted:They didn't even explicitly say "if you run we will shoot you", only that resistance would be met with deadly force. They totally do! quote:"Be advised that I have the capacity to destroy your ships from far beyond any range at which you can possibly threaten us. Be further advised that if you do not immediately cease your attempt to close with my ships or flee the system rather than accept my government's requirements and standing down, I will demonstrate that capability to you in a fashion which not even you can ignore." You can't just waltz up to a foreign fleet and perform a citizen's arrest. You certainly shouldn't tell them that if they try to de-escalate by leaving, you will kill them all. This is what I mean about Manticore's escalation problem; they act as if their military advantage gives them a moral license to dictate terms at gunpoint, rather than engaging in the diplomacy and statesmanship - or even the most elementary caution and restraint - which could have ended all this before it even began. Which is kind of the philosophy of the whole series, right? The good guys will tell you very plainly how hard they can hit you, and when you ignore them, they're going to hit you until you cry uncle. They will sigh and unsheath their Katana light assault craft. Gnoman posted:As for a warning shot, they mention after the actual shooting that their missiles do far better than they really expected. Generally you don't aim warning shots with intent to kill! "We fired several warning shots, killing the suspect" is a painfully true cop joke, not well-handled interstellar crisis management. FuturePastNow posted:There's a third type, the competent and dangerous enemy who is a career military officer and has studiously avoided the capital-p Politics of their terrible star nation, and is Just Doing Their Job for the homeland. If they survive their first book, you know they'll be Honor's friend in the end. A good part of the Solarian League arc is that nearly 100% of these characters are obliterated by Manticoran missiles on their first appearance. I doubt it's on purpose, but it's an effective piece of storytelling about how Manticore's technological advantages have cost it the ability to convert the enemy into friends.
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Mar 27, 2020 14:33
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Gnoman posted:Ok, you do this, and the Solarians tell you to gently caress off. You record this, and release it to the press, along with your sensor recordings. No it doesn't, because in one of these examples, you haven't executed an enemy admiral and his entire crew! Seriously, compare the outcomes here. Above example: the Solarians frame you for blowing up a space station and make it all look like your fault. You are humiliated in the public arena and put on the diplomatic back foot. The Solarians are presumably satisfied with their frame job. Canon: you destroy a Solarian warship after threatening to execute its commander if he tries to run or does anything but surrender all his warships, full of state secrets and classified technology, to your custody. You push your nation toward a war with Space SuperAmerica while you are still locked in a life or death struggle with Haven. How is that in any world good strategic thinking? If I were in charge of Manticore I'd have recalled Henke for 'consultation' immediately and then fast tracked her to some desk job.
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Mar 27, 2020 15:33
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This is exactly the sort of situation that demands furiously worded diplomatic notes, pulled ambassadors, and economic pressure. "We want justice for this wrong but we don't want to get in a shooting war."
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Mar 27, 2020 15:35
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I don’t think there’s any risk of a meltdown.
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Mar 27, 2020 18:21
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Gnoman posted:The frontier forces operate only along the frontier. If you count Manticore as being 40 light years from Earth, then they're well within the frontier and the frontier forces have no business being anywhere near them. If you count them being 500 light years away, they're far beyond the frontier and the frontier forces have no business being anywhere near them. This makes no sense at all my gender-nonspecific dude.
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Apr 5, 2020 19:35
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Like imagine some Solarian technocrat opening up a spreadsheet and saying "Hey these Manticore guys control three quarters of our trade, everyone's routing through them. Should we establish diplomatic relations and start buying up interests in their economy? Maybe give them Most Favored Nation status and make sure their prosperity depends on us? Oh, it says here they're not at the exact distance where we're allowed to use our soft power. Never mind!" The Solarians wouldn't need to send a single ship to conquer Manticore. They'd just do what the good ol US of A did to post-Soviet Russia.
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Apr 5, 2020 19:41
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Saying that they're TOO close to the League to become enmeshed in its soft-power web is especially silly. Oh, they're too accessible and easy to get to! They'll have such quick access to all our culture and banks! We can't possibly devour them now!
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Apr 5, 2020 19:43
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Yeah, it's just hard to imagine Manticore as anything *but* a major object of, at the very least, interest and information-gathering for the League. Even in an oligarchical and corrupt bureaucratic state, a lot of effort is going to go into greasing the wheels and keeping an eye on the locals anywhere the state has economic interests. Weber has gotten himself stuck in a paradox here: Manticore has to be important enough to threaten the League economically, but also overlooked enough that the League is oblivious to its true military power and political influence.
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Apr 5, 2020 20:11
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Frankly the idea of the Manticorans getting into a life or death struggle with the Solarian League Coast Guard (while trying to avoid getting the real military involved) sounds way better than what we got.
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Apr 5, 2020 21:29
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I’m going to finish my rewrite of Mission of Honor and then I’m going to post it. No one can stop me
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Apr 6, 2020 04:05
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She righteously demanded that Earth self destruct every single item of spaceborne technology in the system except for habitats. Earth was cowed by her overwhelming moral superiority and complied. Moral or missile? I can’t remember, they’re so easy to confuse. What’s striking is that Weber spends a lot of words emphasizing how many centuries of progress and labor are being destroyed. He seems to know it’s kind of tragic!
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Apr 7, 2020 14:09
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I've posted the first three chapters of Mission of Honor Retold. I'm ashamed to reveal how many more chapters I have done.
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Apr 11, 2020 18:11
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If you don't want anyone posting about Honor Harrington maybe change the thread title.
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Apr 12, 2020 19:01
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Kchama posted:Also apparently Graysons have trouble with the idea of a female ruler despite the fact that they've been in pretty close contact with other systems enough that they send their rulers out to be educated 500 light years away. They're apparently so isolated and backwards that dealing with a female ruler is a real problem, but not so isolated and backwards that they've been dealing with places with female rulers for at least fifty years. This isn't exactly unprecedented on Earth, and we're a lot closer together than Honorverse planets.
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Apr 13, 2020 23:33
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I think it is generally less interesting to argue 'this universe makes no sense' than to say 'given the universe we are presented, can we think of reasons it does make internal sense?'
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Apr 14, 2020 15:02
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Uh but the Solarians are operating on pre-war technology and they go right for a decapitation strike. It doesn't work due to said missile advances, but it would've worked back in 1900 PD or whenever the war started. Driving 500 dreadnoughts right to Manticore would've been totally viable then. I think the 'star-hopping' strategy we see, with lots of taking and holding territory and raiding the enemy's outer holdings, is just a consequence of Haven and Manticore being fairly evenly matched. If one side thought they had a decisive edge they would (and in fact do) go right for the enemy's center of gravity.
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Apr 14, 2020 18:32
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Speaking of, we are now six chapters into Mission of Honor: Retold, covering roughly the same territory as the first fourteen chapters of the original.
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Apr 15, 2020 00:40
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If I were less lazy I would actually turn the endless meeting scenes into something more interesting to read, rather than just spicing up the dialogue and characters. Like use some of the freed-up wordcount into subplots and development for the 9524 characters. But I am lazy!
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Apr 16, 2020 22:56
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In Chapter Ten of Mission of Honor: Retold, we finally get some naval shooting and a look at the Solarian League Navy's upgraded hardware. The missile accounting will continue.
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Apr 19, 2020 17:07
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I like to imagine that most of Manticore's allies use the added security to invest in their own economies and interstellar future, whereas Grayson is the equivalent of a wild-eyed survivalist who's just climbed out of a bunker and gone on a massive gun spending spree (plus some hydroponic grow stations for the kids, I guess). Spending most of your GSP on cutting edge warships has to come crashing down eventually.
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Apr 20, 2020 00:41
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Yes, that's why the only Grayson scene in Mission Retold (so far) is about their economy collapsing.
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Apr 20, 2020 01:23
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Orthodontically British
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Apr 20, 2020 02:56
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"Anywhere else" As I'm closing in on the end of Mission of Honor Retold I'm wondering where you guys think this story should go in the long run. The canonical ending of Manticore knocking out Earth with a decapitation strike, then calling it a day and going home—but with a little more explanation of the aftermath? League Civil War? Manticore unilaterally ceases military operations to avoid playing into Mesan hands? Manticore goes into catastrophic debt to the Andermani? Haven and the Andermani take the opportunity to force an exploitative treaty with Manticore? So many options! General Battuta fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Apr 20, 2020 |
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Apr 20, 2020 17:58
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What kind of changes did you make for Squadron Strike? I'm always curious about anti-blobbing mechanics.
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Apr 21, 2020 18:49
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Honorverse nerds, do you remember where Manticore's ground-based defense command is located? I don't remember if it's on Mount Royal or somewhere else (putting your NORAD in the royal palace seems dumb but who knows). Do they even have one?
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Apr 24, 2020 22:50
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Thanks, you're my Oyster Bae
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Apr 24, 2020 23:07
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I actually liked that codename a lot, it's got this nice deflationary ordinariness about it, then I realized like so many other naturalistic-sounding things in Weber it's just a dumb pun!
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Apr 24, 2020 23:08
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What would you get if you moored ships in a bay full of oysters, and then maybe went to get the shiny things out of the oysters e: go for the most obvious naval history thing you can think of
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Apr 24, 2020 23:36
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Weber botched the job though, because he wanted the actual 'gun' that fires the missile to be important too - there's all kinds of  about how you need a mass driver to get the missile up to initial velocity and out of the way. His missile pods couldn't be invented until they had miniaturized mass drivers and the power for them.So his missile pods aren't VLS cells. VLS cells would make perfect sense. What they are is boxes of guns dropped behind the ship. And that makes...less sense. Also it's a bit backwards to argue that 'the issue isn't the space missile tubes take up, it's the space magazines take' when the issue Kchama is complaining about is that ships can somehow carry more missile pods in their magazines than they can regular old missiles! Somehow the bigger thing takes up less space?
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May 3, 2020 15:47
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Aerdan posted:The pod ships pack more missiles in because they involve structural changes and higher levels of automation than pre-pod designs, resulting in significantly lower crew sizes and therefore freeing up space to cram more pods in to. The books discuss this, starting with In Enemy Hands (and is of course part of Honor lecturing her mentor-cum-husband about him being Wrong When She's Right™. There is still absolutely no way to make "missile+launcher" take up less room than "missile," and in a podlayer, every single missile is paired with its own bespoke launcher. Podlayers should always carry fewer total missiles than standard warships, and gain benefit in being able to fire larger alpha strikes.
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May 3, 2020 21:08
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Gnoman posted:This is later mentioned as an explicit weakness of the pod types. Conventional ships carry more ammunition. Yes, unless you actually do the math, when it turns out they don't. We know what the books say, we're just commenting on the inconsistency.
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May 4, 2020 00:02
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"That is good news!" Yanakov said enthusiastically. "I'll get right on it. I'll pick you up in my car in fifteen minutes."
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May 4, 2020 06:14
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