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FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Arguably, the entire nation of Japan had a *cough*deadly fascination*cough* with military fiction for forty or so years last century.
As thread OP, I have no real problems against japanese mil-scifi or military fiction manga being discussed in here....does anyone else have issues with this?

I'm sure Weber would approve

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FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


I bought it the day the ebook became available

I know these books are bad but I still love them

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


I think every non-mil/gov Grayson citizen we meet is either Honor's employee or is plotting against her somehow

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


PupsOfWar posted:

we're meant to root for the Talbot cluster being seized away from the League because these regions outlying the League are economically and politically exploited by the Office of Frontier Security in a host of different ways...which is fine right up until we're expected to assume Manticore would never do any such thing.

I think he was setting up Talbott to be the Space Philippines so Honor's friend Michelle could be Space MacArthur, before someone told him to wrap the story the gently caress up

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Kchama posted:

And PupsOfWar isn't wrong to compare the SLN to the US, since Weber does as well - he describes the Solarian League as the USA with Manticore being, in their view, France (though this is one of those views where it shows how out of touch Weber is, since apparently France isn't really that much better than a Third World Nation in his eyes) and Haven is... also France? I guess. And that's why apparently it's fine to ignore them forever.

Solarian League is bad USA (and UN and EU all combined)

Haven post-revolutions is good USA

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


I always pictured Masada as the Handmaid's Tale Planet rather than Muslims but that makes more sense in retrospect

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Kchama posted:

I'm pretty sure what gave that impression is the fact that all the women were forced to wear burqas at all times, combined with the other stuff that mirrors negative stereotypes of Muslims but not Mormons.

Like not being allowed to read, write, or specifically drive.

no, American evangelicals want all that too

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Fell Fire posted:

:shrug: As I remember it, it wasn't literal, more like how Washington gets compared to Cincinnatus. Patton believed he was Caesar, or someone like that.


We really lucked out when Patton's jeep got hit by a truck. He probably would have started WWIII

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Hyrax Attack! posted:

-The end sequence where Honor is receiving accolades, and it’s thrown in “oh yeah, she’s a millionaire now”

Don't worry, she'll be a billionaire soon and one of the wealthiest people in the galaxy eventually

FuturePastNow fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Jul 21, 2019

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


I also read all of the Ender's Game sequels 15ish years ago and the only little thing I think I remember is the box you could get in and move faster than light with your mind... or something.

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Omi no Kami posted:

Incidentally, have the latest honor harrington books gone anywhere interesting?

noop

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


jng2058 posted:

This is why I actually like In Death Ground and The Shiva Option, because they're not in the Honorverse and Steve White, Weber's co-author for those books, does a decent job of keeping Weber on task.

The rest of the Starfire books are only fair to middling, and alas when White inherited the series after Weber left they fell right off a cliff. But for a couple of books there? It was pretty good.

Crusade was actually my first Weber novel, followed by In Death Ground and The Shiva Option, then I read Apocalypse Troll and the Dahak novels. So I read more or less all of Weber's non-Honor Harrington sci-fi before the series he's probably best known for. At least I had a good idea what I was getting into.

I did really like the unintentional comedy bit in the newest Harrington novel when the rogue Solarian intelligence officers discover that Mesan agents who've infiltrated their navy all have nanotech that will kill them instantly when they're discovered, and they root out the enemy agents by inviting high-ranking officers into meetings, pretending to arrest them, and seeing which ones drop dead

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


ToxicFrog posted:

I started reading it because I was in high school, they were free, and I wanted some SF to read that was about bigass fleet battles but wasn't Star Wars. And I'd already read the Conquerors trilogy twice.

Are you me?

except I just kept reading them

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


You can definitely tell the Starfire series is based on a wargame. I like it anyway, none of the characters are as cringeworthy as any member of Honor's inner circle

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Three of the Starfire novels even have a prototype for Honor named Hannah (goes from battlecruiser captain to Sky Marshal and loses half her organic face along the way) except she gets a lot less page-time and isn't crawled up her own rear end. Plus the novels sometimes get down to the POV of guerilla fighters and fighter pilots and marines, in between the battles with thousands of ships firing millions of missiles.

idk how much of these novels are Weber, vs. White

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


NoNostalgia4Grover posted:

Cordwainer Smith, godfather of the furry movement. Cordwainer Smith, who got extremely excited overhearing the term "animal husbandry". Cordwainer Smith, banned and arrest-on-sight from 6 veterinarian practices and 3 "normal" medical doctors offices for his hands-on cat breeding method.



edit: lol he's buried at Arlington

FuturePastNow fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Aug 29, 2019

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

The journey of the Baltic Fleet would make an excellent comedy :colbert:

The journey of Russian fleets around the world is still a comedy

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Kchama posted:

It's a lot bigger in the side stories, IIRC.

Weber doesn't like infantry cuz they're all dirty poors, though.

Weber loves scenes where a small unit of Marines push through an enemy/pirate ship/base, until the last one alive makes it to the enemy commander and blows him to bits. These scenes are a tiny % of the novels overall but they're a recurring theme.

Of course, there's also the scene where Honor decapitates a dude with a katana.

And the mass murder of natives in the first book.

Weber loves ground combat, just some specific forms thereof.

FuturePastNow fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Aug 31, 2019

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Gnoman posted:

The hostile nomads were attacking a region containing multiple native cities (at least three are mentioned by name), and a key clue to figuring it out was a nomad who was told "don't go to this region this winter or you'll die" and decided to pass it on to the off-world government to repay a debt.

Also, it's been a really, really long time since I've read On Basilisk Station, but I think I remember drugs were involved. Like the attacking mob of natives were out of their minds on space heroin. Which, and this is just me, I don't think it makes gunning them down en masse ok

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


shovelbum posted:

Weber's ships are invincible on the top and bottom to make them function exactly like they're in 2d, but in space

Yeah and since it's never presented as hard science sci-fi, I don't really have any problems with Weber contriving technologies to work in such a way that you get space sailing ships firing broadsides at each other. In fact I think that's a neat premise. He just took that premise and threw it down an ever-deepening hole, almost from the start.

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Yvonmukluk posted:

So what's to stop a tactical genius rotating his ship 90 degrees so it's immune to enemy fire? Or is this a thing they already do in-universe?

They do this and the smart captains admirals Duchesses expect it and fire their missiles over and under the enemy

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Yes, tactics existed in the early books when it was just cruisers and battlecruisers fighting on roughly even terms and short ranges.

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


TheGreatEvilKing posted:

Despite what David Weber would tell you, there are often competent and intelligent people on the other side too.

And whenever Weber shows you a competent bad guy, you know they're going to make a heel-face turn within the next couple books. Like clockwork.

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


I liked that all the characters just assumed it was an assassination instead of an accident and blamed the bad guys on that basis

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


I assume space pirates would act like real pirates did. Spotting and intercepting a ship on the high seas in the age of sail was hard as gently caress, and an extremely rare occurrence. Generally, pirates would fly a false flag and hang around outside a port or river where a target would eventually come to them. Or they'd have intel from a spy or an insider telling them where a valuable cargo would be going and when.

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Larry Parrish posted:

god i hate Weber lol. if he was able to glen cook his way past the details into a good story it wouldn't matter but welp. im like 90% sure at this point that the honorverse was written when he watched a samurai movie and then imagined how much better it would be if it was a hot british chick versus a cowboy, and everything is in service of making that scene happen

hell, I'd read that book

that's probably why I've read all of these books

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Yeah Weber's original outline had Honor dying at the Battle of Manticore, followed by a 20 year timeskip when her children would be joining the RMN and become the main characters, along with the characters who'd been Ensigns and Lieutenants before the timeskip as the the higher ranking officers. But of course he didn't follow that plan.

I think he's going to take some years away from those characters, work on his other series, and then if he's feeling it later (and lives long enough) come back and do the timeskip he originally planned.

I took the way that last book ended, and the author's postscript after, to be basically him saying "please stop asking when the next one is coming," rather than "there's never going to another one."

FuturePastNow fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Nov 2, 2019

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


It's been a long time since I read those, on the recommendation of a friend, but I remember the constant "My Lady", "My Lord" making me lust for main character deaths

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


90s Cringe Rock posted:

riding a neotiger was not one of dio's best lines

well you can't ride a hexapuma, that's for drat sure

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Kchama posted:

There's no explanation what Manticore or Haven are, and it's more or less treated like everyone in the room has been fully introduced.


I first read OBS a long time ago and I remember it dropping you into the setting with very little explanation of who the players are.

If Weber were a good writer (and to be fair, I think he was a better writer when he wrote this) I'd suggest this might have been meant to mirror the character's transition from being politically blind to becoming a VIP.

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Kchama posted:

That's why I pointed out the Pearl of Weber because it claims that there's a huge level of automation in the background but at the same time, per the written word, the ships have people doing everything anyways so the automation ends up unused and redundant in a bad way. The Pearl actually goes on to say that ship 'expert packages' degrade in quality as a ship takes damage, causing poor performance even when this wouldn't make sense. They specify this as a weakness of MAnticorean ships as they are very automated, whereas apparently Haven ships are less automated and therefore do not have as much of a degrade in performance as a ship is damaged which... what?

Probably just Weber thinking of it as narrative around a pen & paper wargame.

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Kchama posted:

Also to add to this as to WHY I think that's the case and it not just being a dismissive joke, a lot of Honorverse is specifically based on a tabletop game that Weber was the designer of. Which is why Manticore's entire economy is based on trading in some form (because economy in the game he designed was entirely based around trading) and why the ship classes work the way they do, being entirely based on relative size as opposed to other features, which is... the same as his tabletop game, right down to the class names of the ships themselves.

OBS also came right after he finished the second Starfire novel which is literally the novelization of a wargame campaign. So he had it on the brain. More than usual, that is.

E: Crusade also has a character named Hannah who is a battlecruiser captain until she rules-lawyers her way into declaring martial law over a colony behind enemy lines, defending it and ruling it as a military dictator until it gets liberated by friendly forces, and her face gets hosed up in the final battle. By the fourth Starfire novel, she's been promoted to Sky Marshal.

David Weber doesn't have very many characters. He just likes a few specific ones.

FuturePastNow fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Dec 31, 2019

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


out of the names of all the myriad ship's boats in the age of sail, Weber sure did fall in love with the word pinnace

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


If I remember right, a pinnace has no less than four propulsion systems: an impeller for faster spaceflight (but not the good kind of impeller than can make a hyperspace sail), thrusters for slow speed maneuvers, turbines for atmospheric flight, and a counter-grav so it can hover and land vertically. It also has laser guns, an inertia compensator so the impeller doesn't gib its passengers, and is made of "battle steel". This is all apparently powered by batteries because Weber later establishes that fusion reactors can't be miniaturized (since he makes a big deal about the space-fighter LACs having fission powerplants). These systems are crammed into something the size of a C-5 but shaped like the Space Shuttle.

Now a lot of that never made sense to me, because the Manticoran recon drones are powered by miniature fusion reactors, but maybe those are even bigger than a pinnace. Also once you've invented antigravity propulsion, your civilization has reached the end of the sublight tech tree and you won't need thrusters or turbines ever again.

FuturePastNow fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Jan 4, 2020

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Patrat posted:

To be fair, the thrusters might be pretty tiny. I am imagining a couple of glorified fire extinguishers strapped to the outside of the hull to allow for cold gas maneuvering to dock without doing... whatever the gently caress tidal force mangling gravity manipulation drives might do to solid objects in immediate proximity.

What happens when a pinnace's impeller is activated while inside the boat bay of a warship is actually an important plot point in a later book in the series

this kills the battlecruiser

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


I dunno I think I agree with Larry, the Honorverse is a huge grab bag of things Weber likes from throughout the last 250 or so years of military history

like that latter thing might make more sense if you know that Weber probably read in a book that Admiral Nimitz had a shooting range built at Pacific Fleet Headquarters in Hawaii so he could perforate targets when he needed a mental break

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


it's worse when you know they'll be friends ten books down the line once they share the common trait of both being trillionaires

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


we'll always have Nouveau Paris

FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


Gnoman posted:

It was almost destroyed in the backstory, but in the "present" it is the capital system of the largest space country.

And the capitol of both Old Earth and the Solarian League is Old Chicago. It's either implied or maybe stated that this is the biggest city that survived the Final War

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FuturePastNow
May 19, 2014


quantumfoam posted:

Wait a sec....
Did David Weber "adopt" backstory from the live-action Buck Rogers tv series for his Honorverse setting?
Oh this is getting funny. Erin Gray and Honor Harrington look uncannily alike too.

He "adopted" everything else in the story, so sure why not.

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