What Checkov's Guns have you found in the Honorverse

roseandheather wrote:Arnold Giancola, general selfish, horrible, all-round piece of shit for obvious Haven-hurting (and Manticore-hurting) reasons. I will never, ever forgive him.

Touche', rnh. I almost put him on my original list.

(Of course, over the months of our [remote] association, I have come to conclude that you learned your standards and criteria for forgiveness from Elizabeth III.)

dr

dreamrider wrote:

vietnamabc wrote:Ships with configurable Warshawski sail that specialize in h-space combat, moving between secondary termini, ships that can hyper out in resonance zone/ seeing in RZ.

Is this note in the wrong thread?

Since these things do not exist in the Honorverse canon, they pretty much cannot be Checkov's muskets.

dreamrider

Well as mentioned above, the theoretical ability to directly transit to between a junciton's secondary terminii has been mentioned in the books. (No ones figured out how to do that, but it wouldn't be horribly shocking if someone made that tech / skill breakthrough).

And you can have ships that specialize in grav-wave combat; but it's too rare to be worth building them.

The rest of the ideas though... Yeah, those are way out there with no basis I can think of in the text. (Now if you want someone to figure out how to avoid getting vaporized transiting up at over 0.3c; well we've been told there were years of attempts. A new approach that cracked that limit might be plausible)

dreamrider wrote:

roseandheather wrote:Arnold Giancola, general selfish, horrible, all-round piece of shit for obvious Haven-hurting (and Manticore-hurting) reasons. I will never, ever forgive him.

Touche', rnh. I almost put him on my original list.

(Of course, over the months of our [remote] association, I have come to conclude that you learned your standards and criteria for forgiveness from Elizabeth III.)

dr

Please.

Her Majesty learned her standards and criteria for forgiveness from me.

quark wrote:I disagree with you on several points Mor. Sorry for the long post, but please comment back on anything you have reason to disagree with in my post. [...] I'm been into the honorverse books for 4-5 years, [...]

You may counter each point separately, but they add up just the same i.e. Honor being too perfect. She is super strong (exotically beautiful), super smart, over skilled (sword fighting really?!) with over idealized nature and overall everything comes too easy for her. (she could have been a super fire-sword wielding, orphan, sheepherder ) Also keep in mind that people who are immersed\invested in the story, tend to be more forgiving of little details and rationalize others, especially when its big universe\time-investment... been there done that

quark wrote:The point about Honor's meaningful relationships. To begin with, the first two books aren't a great introduction to that, because both are about her postings to areas far from her home/social circle. [...]

The first two books are the introduction to Honor. You have nice outlook on her character, but it is your interpretation one few "off screen" tidbits, later books and or wishful thinking. To me in those books where most tech got more "screen time" than all that put together, it is not hard to imagine why she come off as distant and cold (and few other things which i'll get to later, which are why I can't care less about Honor and her crew.)

What do expect, 40+ years old with no meaningful relationship (except parents, father figure and cat), not too social, who keep distant and professional toward her subordinates (except few official diners), even her described activities take her outside of the social circle (night exercise when there is no one around). How exactly "she goes into the trouble of finding out about" her crew? personal interviews ain't that personal, nor is info you can get from your officers (even if they were on good standing)? I can understand bootlicker, respect, some shared experience etc but the notion that her crew went from a resentful to fatherly with blank-y covering is ridiculous.

Also on topic of her character, in one of the previous post someone mentioned that Honor has her personal demons/inadequacies. Which is true "on paper", it has such negligible effect and she is such a Mary Sue that it is difficult to care e.g. even her loss of control attacking the civilian official in charge of their expedition, was more righteous than reckless.

quark wrote:I disagree that Theisman and Yu are plot devices. Yu killed Courvosier, and devastated the Grayson navy, and theisman killed many manticoran sailors. Yes, they shared common ground with Honor, but that supports our argument not yours. We are saying that there are good traits in some bad guys, which removes that black and white aspect.

So what? even if some bad guys has few good quality, it doesn't prove your point, at best you show the story is predominantly colored Black and White (which I assumed was given, this is not a child book after all). Besides looking at the wiki it appears that Yu defected, which only proves my point. Further examples:

Our "bad guys" don't seem to have any sympathetic motivation for their actions, they always end in bed with character of ill repute and while they have the upper hand they lose due to inherit incompetence. While Honor and her Legal of legends do things because it is the "right thing to do". Also look at the difference between our good guys and bad predominante characterisation: uneducated vs worldly educated ; hate\rape women vs deep respect\love ; genoicidal extrimist vs moderate who showed mercy to their enemy ; backstabbing, indecisive, cowards vs fighting for comradeship and ready to take action for what is right... This and the fact all of Honor adversaries being incompetent idiot, with no redeeming qualities, why she is never faced with unambiguously choices. Also our perfect Honor don't have anger issue, it is righteous fury that only gain her respect ..

Which reminds me Manti is in a standoff, with war looming, and this is an important strategic objective and the admiral was given orders to do anything to secure it; being on the good team he go deliver a lecture on women rights and how their not apologizing to Honor will effect their cooperation because in RL self respecting country never look the other way... Of course Grayson being the good guys obviously realize the inherent truth of it(the only one who isn't is a traitor) unlike the Masadan guys who actually had a RL dictatorship response i.e. fake smile and nod while the bucks are flowing...


EDIT:

quark wrote:Third, Honor isn't portrayed as having a "super grasp of ground operations." The only area where ground operations are present is in OBS, and you'll notice that she left almost the entirety of the operational planning to her experts on it, and she never tried to override them in that, or the actual conduction of ground ops, instead, she gave them what feedback she could from a fleet perspective and what she wanted to do with Fearless.

Fleet perspective hu? I thought that former Marine Major, whose elite unite mention filled his counterpart with awe, should have some fleet perspective and experience with exactly that type of operations as well as local experience. While honor whose perspective was based on wasting their time by giving them incomplete information, and who to our knowledge had no practical experience with such operation only was there to show off her amazing tactical abilities.

Anyway I don't have time to address more points nor give more examples. So to sum it up, while on paper those novels are very detailed in some regards e,g, tech/military/history (and if you gutout Honor, you can have a nice background story for game), ti me they are reminiscent of fantasy books I used to read (only in space) which is one of the reasons I find Honor to be unrealistic and extremely annoying.

:shrug: I'm sorry you don't enjoy the Honorverse as much as everybody else here, but if you don't like them, don't read them.

I am kind of curious as to why you created an account on this forum just to say you don't like the books, as this is a personality trait that I would associate with a mythological creature that tended to reside under bridges.

Mor wrote:

quark wrote:I disagree with you on several points Mor. Sorry for the long post, but please comment back on anything you have reason to disagree with in my post. [...] I'm been into the honorverse books for 4-5 years, [...]

You may counter each point separately, but they add up just the same i.e. Honor being too perfect. She is super strong (exotically beautiful), super smart, over skilled (sword fighting really?!) with over idealized nature and overall everything comes too easy for her. (she could have been a super fire-sword wielding, orphan, sheepherder ) Also keep in mind that people who are immersed\invested in the story, tend to be more forgiving of little details and rationalize others, especially when its big universe\time-investment... been there done that

quark wrote:The point about Honor's meaningful relationships. To begin with, the first two books aren't a great introduction to that, because both are about her postings to areas far from her home/social circle. [...]

The first two books are the introduction to Honor. You have nice outlook on her character, but it is your interpretation one few "off screen" tidbits, later books and or wishful thinking. To me in those books where most tech got more "screen time" than all that put together, it is not hard to imagine why she come off as distant and cold (and few other things which i'll get to later, which are why I can't care less about Honor and her crew.)

What do expect, 40+ years old with no meaningful relationship (except parents, father figure and cat), not too social, who keep distant and professional toward her subordinates (except few official diners), even her described activities take her outside of the social circle (night exercise when there is no one around). How exactly "she goes into the trouble of finding out about" her crew? personal interviews ain't that personal, nor is info you can get from your officers (even if they were on good standing)? I can understand bootlicker, respect, some shared experience etc but the notion that her crew went from a resentful to fatherly with blank-y covering is ridiculous.

Also on topic of her character, in one of the previous post someone mentioned that Honor has her personal demons/inadequacies. Which is true "on paper", it has such negligible effect and she is such a Mary Sue that it is difficult to care e.g. even her loss of control attacking the civilian official in charge of their expedition, was more righteous than reckless.

quark wrote:I disagree that Theisman and Yu are plot devices. Yu killed Courvosier, and devastated the Grayson navy, and theisman killed many manticoran sailors. Yes, they shared common ground with Honor, but that supports our argument not yours. We are saying that there are good traits in some bad guys, which removes that black and white aspect.

So what? even if some bad guys has few good quality, it doesn't prove your point, at best you show the story is predominantly colored Black and White (which I assumed was given, this is not a child book after all). Besides looking at the wiki it appears that Yu defected, which only proves my point. Further examples:

Our "bad guys" don't seem to have any sympathetic motivation for their actions, they always end in bed with character of ill repute and while they have the upper hand they lose due to inherit incompetence. While Honor and her Legal of legends do things because it is the "right thing to do". Also look at the difference between our good guys and bad predominante characterisation: uneducated vs worldly educated ; hate\rape women vs deep respect\love ; genoicidal extrimist vs moderate who showed mercy to their enemy ; backstabbing, indecisive, cowards vs fighting for comradeship and ready to take action for what is right... This and the fact all of Honor adversaries being incompetent idiot, with no redeeming qualities, why she is never faced with unambiguously choices. Also our perfect Honor don't have anger issue, it is righteous fury that only gain her respect ..

Which reminds me Manti is in a standoff, with war looming, and this is an important strategic objective and the admiral was given orders to do anything to secure it; being on the good team he go deliver a lecture on women rights and how their not apologizing to Honor will effect their cooperation because in RL self respecting country never look the other way... Of course Grayson being the good guys obviously realize the inherent truth of it(the only one who isn't is a traitor) unlike the Masadan guys who actually had a RL dictatorship response i.e. fake smile and nod while the bucks are flowing...


EDIT:

quark wrote:Third, Honor isn't portrayed as having a "super grasp of ground operations." The only area where ground operations are present is in OBS, and you'll notice that she left almost the entirety of the operational planning to her experts on it, and she never tried to override them in that, or the actual conduction of ground ops, instead, she gave them what feedback she could from a fleet perspective and what she wanted to do with Fearless.

Fleet perspective hu? I thought that former Marine Major, whose elite unite mention filled his counterpart with awe, should have some fleet perspective and experience with exactly that type of operations as well as local experience. While honor whose perspective was based on wasting their time by giving them incomplete information, and who to our knowledge had no practical experience with such operation only was there to show off her amazing tactical abilities.

Anyway I don't have time to address more points nor give more examples. So to sum it up, while on paper those novels are very detailed in some regards e,g, tech/military/history (and if you gutout Honor, you can have a nice background story for game), ti me they are reminiscent of fantasy books I used to read (only in space) which is one of the reasons I find Honor to be unrealistic and extremely annoying.

dreamrider wrote:

vietnamabc wrote:Ships with configurable Warshawski sail that specialize in h-space combat, moving between secondary termini, ships that can hyper out in resonance zone/ seeing in RZ.

Is this note in the wrong thread?

Since these things do not exist in the Honorverse canon, they pretty much cannot be Checkov's muskets.

dreamrider

About the ships specializing in h-space combat, in OBS, it is said that these things are doable, but they gimped ship's performance in n-space so much that nobody tries to use it. (The same thing is also said to LAC and missle pods later too and you know how these two turn out).

vietnamabc wrote:About the ships specializing in h-space combat, in OBS, it is said that these things are doable, but they gimped ship's performance in n-space so much that nobody tries to use it. (The same thing is also said to LAC and missle pods later too and you know how these two turn out).

OK. Point taken.

dr

Quotes reordered to avoid embedding limit.

vietnamabc wrote:Ships with configurable Warshawski sail that specialize in h-space combat, moving between secondary termini, ships that can hyper out in resonance zone/ seeing in RZ.

dreamrider wrote:Is this note in the wrong thread?

Since these things do not exist in the Honorverse canon, they pretty much cannot be Checkov's muskets.dreamrider

vietnamabc wrote:About the ships specializing in h-space combat, in OBS, it is said that these things are doable, but they gimped ship's performance in n-space so much that nobody tries to use it. (The same thing is also said to LAC and missle pods later too and you know how these two turn out).

Minor note: The reference to ships optimized for hyper combat (and therefore being at a severe disadvantage in normal space combat as a result) is found in the appendix of The Short Victorious War, Honor Harrington' Navy - Naval Design and Doctrine.

Vince wrote:Quotes reordered to avoid embedding limit.

vietnamabc wrote:Ships with configurable Warshawski sail that specialize in h-space combat, moving between secondary termini, ships that can hyper out in resonance zone/ seeing in RZ.

dreamrider wrote:Is this note in the wrong thread?

Since these things do not exist in the Honorverse canon, they pretty much cannot be Checkov's muskets.dreamrider

vietnamabc wrote:About the ships specializing in h-space combat, in OBS, it is said that these things are doable, but they gimped ship's performance in n-space so much that nobody tries to use it. (The same thing is also said to LAC and missle pods later too and you know how these two turn out).

Minor note: The reference to ships optimized for hyper combat (and therefore being at a severe disadvantage in normal space combat as a result) is found in the appendix of The Short Victorious War, Honor Harrington' Navy - Naval Design and Doctrine.

So now after Mission of Honor we know there are 3 types of existing drive: normal impeller wedge, streak drive and spider drive, only the first can be crammed into a missle, now maybe in the future, MAN or GA can figure out how to squeeze the other two into the missle: imagine missle with crazy acc (>0.3c) or stealth missle with the mega pod salvo, things might be very interesting.

vietnamabc wrote:So now after Mission of Honor we know there are 3 types of existing drive: normal impeller wedge, streak drive and spider drive, only the first can be crammed into a missle, now maybe in the future, MAN or GA can figure out how to squeeze the other two into the missle: imagine missle with crazy acc (>0.3c) or stealth missle with the mega pod salvo, things might be very interesting.

You can't count Streak Drive unless you also count HyperDrive. Streak Drive is just an improved HyperDrive. Streak Drive does not produce any acceleration; it only lets the ship transit between hyperspace bands. The Alignment has not produced any "crazy acc" drive.