Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Honor Harrington can't commit a war crime because any war crime she committed would be retroactively discovered to have been Actually Good and Cool the Whole Time afterwards.

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Did you bitches not read the 2nd sentence of the OP, which covers this exact situation.

occamsnailfile posted:

There was at least one occasion when Honor was going to shoot a POW out of hand. Now, the guy was miserable scum, but still protected under space law etc. One of her subordinates knocked her gun aside--so she almost did, but the plot saved her. I can't remember any of the other details like which book, who the guy was specifically, or who prevented her from shooting, but having a murderous temper is one of her major character traits.

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Welcome back, friend.
Didn't Honor Harrington + friends do the same hidden military vessel/illegal Q-ship bullshit that the first book(On Basilisk Station) raged about a book or two later? Only it was more Q-ships (filled to the brims with missile pods) when Manticore/Harrington did it?

NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Regardless, what Mil-SciFi authors besides David Weber obviously, do you enjoy reading or talking poo poo about?

PupsOfWar posted:

is that the same short story (written by someone else for an anthology) where the grav lance had been improved to negate all the weaknesses of the original design

i recall this grav-lance variant having a range of like a million kilometers (twice normal energy range!) and being able to strip off the full impeller wedge rather than just the sidewalls

Kchama posted:

StrixNebulosa posted:

"Quiz/Reading Comprehension Questions–multiple choice/short answer questions to
test reading comprehension:
1. Who are the “Dolists” and what problem do they pose for the Republic of Haven?
(chap. 1)

answer to 1
". The Dolists are the “mob,” the people who have supported Haven’s wars in order
to have a better standard of living. They are “on the dole,” dependent on
government support to live. The are “useless drones” who are sucking up
resources without contributing. Their demands contribute to Haven’s need to
conquer new territory in order to keep their economy viable"

that's not how welfare works, weber!

C.M. Kruger posted:

Weber claims he "writes" at something absurd like 150 words per minute because he actually uses a speech recognition program, so I'd cut down the actual writing time to a weekend at most.

PupsOfWar posted:

it amuses me that they tried making a wargame out of honorverse

like

for wargames people a lot of the appeal is collecting all the different dudes and painting them to look cool (if supplied unpainted) or at least displaying them (if supplied painted)

40k is a bad game and a lot of the sculpts of the models are bad, designed to be slammed out in vast bulk by terrible injection molding equipment from the mid 90s. But the dudes who do it enjoy getting to paint up all the different bits and heraldry. This works very well with a gonzo setting where you can have mecha, exosuits, tanks, artillery, werewolves, dragons, and several different types of flamboyant space knights and space ninja, all in the same battle. This fundamentally is why all of the main wargaming settings are wild and colorful and anachronistic - people want a wide variety of things to paint and display.

you can't do this with honorverse since in honorverse all ships share the same fundamental shape

it is hard to imagine that people who like to paint & display models would enjoy this

what are they gonna do with fleets that are all just incrementally varying sizes of the same thing

Kchama posted:

It's why they're the Empire of Manticore now. And IIRC all the annexations were all voted for in mass by the annexed.


Of course there's a bit in the book where Manticore more or less rigged the vote so they'd win it (and they forced the vote in the first place with their spies) but this was Actually Good, You Guys and we were suppose to hate the locals for trying to stop this.

Kchama posted:

Yeah it's possible. The Talbott Sector had the few parts of the Solarian League with modern tech because for some reason they only ever gave new ships to the frontier sectors despite the Solarian League supposedly being super greedy and thus you think the good ships would go to the home systems or something. So all the good ships would be concentrated in a couple of places where they could more or less 'system hop'. And then they'd just annihilate the entire Solarian League fleet at once that they kept hyping up but it doesn't seem like it ever showed.

Kchama posted:

Yeah but it's still stupid and doesn't make sense in the slightest. It was part of the whole 'setting them up to be the paperest tiger to ever paper a tiger' thing I mentioned. If you have to make that stupid then why even bother? I guess that's in the end why they didn't even face the Battle Fleet and the Solarian League went down like superchumps.

I mean, gently caress, by Weber's reckoning no one in the Battle Fleet was even ALIVE when the Battle Fleet actually had its victories, so why is everyone so confident in it?

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

I can't be the only person who remembers the Big Solarian Sneak Attack that Manticore knew about from the beginning of the book, right?

Larry Parrish posted:

One thing that never made sense to me is Manticore was settled by STL sleeper ships, and once they had arrived, wormholes and Alcubierre drives had been invented. So why didnt anyone just invade Manticore and take this supposedly very valuable system that has a ton of wormholes and three habitable planets? What, did weapons technology not evolve in 500 years so those ancient sleeper ships were competitive?

PupsOfWar posted:

frankowski is a Terrible Author everyone here would enjoy dunking on

iirc the stargard books got (justly) banned from most book stores and libraries for advocating pedophilia though, so there aren't really any sporkings of them around

Arcsquad12 posted:

Back to terrible Weber stories and insane jingoism. Now I read the first three Ender's Game books by Card, and I've seen he never really left the series alone, making a book series called Ender's Shadow starring Bean. Are they as bad and superfluous as they sound?

shovelbum posted:

You would think that the ratio would be reversed in such a society

shovelbum posted:

my favorite is that gravity is faster than light in weber

C.M. Kruger posted:

Along with Sgt. Bothari there's also that bit with Lt. Koudelka attempting to force himself on his future wife or something to that effect, going "oh no i've done something terrible" and then IIRC everybody else just kinda laughs it off since he's a cripple and she could have easily fought him off and also turns out to have already been interested in him.

Kchama posted:

Also a lot of this book becomes a bit more nonsensical when the later stuff basically says it took until several books from now for there to be actual communication between Medusans and humans, as the Medusan native language is impossible for a human to understand.

Kchama posted:

Probably. It just immediately struck me as very out of place because of the implication that it was bed-clothes or a robe to wear when getting out of bed. It's pretty much akin to wearing a three-piece-suit as pyjamas or a bath-robe.

Gnoman posted:

I don't see any way you can see racism anywhere in this chapter.

Kchama posted:

Ringo, Weber, and Flint alllllllllllll suck hard. I hate his stuff in the Honorverse more than I hate Weber's stuff.

And yeah I saw that Bujold was the one who required they be removed from the free CD.


By the way I had been looking for this a lot earlier and finally found it and I just wanted to laugh at Manticore being a 'raving meritocracy'.