Imperial Harchong Army

Louis R wrote:Whooo boy! You clearly need to spend some time with something other than political and military history.

I defy you to name any time or place where women weren't "contributing members" of society. You're going to have to look long and hard just to find places where women weren't responsible for a major proportion of cash-equivalent household income. Never mind all the _other_ stuff they've been saddled with.

It's actually the fact that 60% of the population is traditionally regarded as 'unfit for military service' that has allowed the sport to keep going for as long as it has.

ChronicRder wrote:Impressive numbers and very helpful breakdown. I'm saving this in a spreadsheet for later reference. RFC, do you have any other spreadsheets you could share with us to help with following some of the finer points? Even if only to check our notes against, these lists and numbers would be extremely helpful.

My question is, in a society where women aren't contributing members of society, why do you say the military is made of x percentage of the population when roughly 60% of the population in ineligible for military service? Why wouldn't you say it has x percentage of the eligible population instead total population to get a more realistic impact of a State having a larger military?

Fair point. I should have said considered as contributing members of society.
I am neither discrediting the jobs the do in the home, nor discounting their traditional role as Sisters in some religious order, Priestesses, oracles, nurses, prostitutes, or teachers. However, in terms of output in most quantifiable industries like manufacturing, military service, sailors, tradesman, merchants, bankers, etc, their contribution is only a fairly recent development and acknowledgement. Not defending that; not saying it was right. It was just the way things were except in very few, specific circumstances.

My original thing about army sizes vs the population should be viewed in terms of how many are elligible for military service vs how many are in military service.

As we've seen both in Safehold and Honorverse, these specialized populations make up a only fraction of the population (somewhere around 20% all told). But they are "the most productive" percentage of the population. Removing them from the workforce or viewing casualties to those populations in relation to themselves and how long it takes to train a proper replacement gives a sobering picture about the challenges societies, nations, States, and leaders of those face.

I may spend a lot of time in political and military studies/histories, but that is a specialization of mine. It is what it is. Numbers, trends, and whatnot about who is eligible and who contributes to society by which criteria changes person to person, generation to generation, society to society.
Its a social and political construct; nothing more, nothing less.

Hi Dennis,

Yup, some of us have been willing to pay for RFC's original Honorverse bible for quite a few years in lieu of new textev, what we've got so far is HoS etc with updated Bu9 stuff instead.

But whether its SITS [Saganami Island Tactical Simulator], Jayne's, or other Bu9 stuff, its just not RFC, even when its as simple as the above example.

Which is why the last ten days has been fantastic!

"The hero has returned".

L

DMcCunney wrote:

Aethor wrote:This is a very, very good and professional way to write military (science) fiction. Establish a plausible world, with history and all, list exactly what each side has at its disposal and how fast can they build/train more, and then the story goes within the limits of that.

This is what makes is plausible, which makes the immersion work, makes me really believing in that world while reading it.

Authors writing a series set in a universe they created often create series bibles with those details. The details may not appear in the books, but the author needs to know them, simply to provide the sort of coherence you mention. It avoids the sort of "Wait a minute! You can't get there from here!" moments that less well crafted books can produce. That sort of thing can toss the reader out of the story.

I wouldn't expect to see it till the Safehold series is completed, but I'd pay good money for a copy if David chose to release the series bible he created for Safehold (and for the Honorverse, too.)

Of course, bibles are subject to revision. In the Honorverse, for example, the original series plan had Honor dying at the end of At All Costs. Her career paralleled the careers of the fictional Horatio Hornblower and the real Admiral Lord Nelson, and Nelson died at Trafalgar. That didn't happen, and the Honorverse changed direction, with Manpower (and the Mesan Alignment that was behind it) becoming the true bad guys, and other characters in the Honorverse like Countess Gold Peak becoming leads in their own books in the series. I believe David has commented elsewhere about stuff in his bibles he had to revise because of errors in his original assumptions that would affect the books.
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Dennis