cthia wrote:Mitchell, Esq. wrote:Haven has been fighting Manticore for 20+ years with inferior tech.
I'd be more than shocked if the Haven Navy didn't have a crusher program of its own, and one that is every bit the equal, or superior, than the RMN.
I'd be shocked as well, yet I don't recall any definitive textev ever even mentioning it in passing. In fact, I always assimilated all of the talk about Saggy Isle and the unprecedented Crusher as being not only a one of a kind set of hardware, but a one of a kind concept.
All we know about the Havenite naval academy at this point is that a) it exists, b) it takes a minimum of three years, and c) at one point during his studenthood there, Thomas Theisman got very, very drunk. (Poor baby.) I, for one, am just itching to get more info about the officer academy. We know Haven's level of education as a whole is inferior to Manticore's and that naval ratings are often under-educated and trained in a fairly slapdash manner so that they're only barely competent to do their jobs, but we're given little indication of how much of that is true for the officer corps. Given that it produced fiendish tactical minds like Esther McQueen, Tom Theisman, Javier Giscard, Lester Tourville, and Jennifer Bellefeuille, however, they're obviously doing something right. The Crusher might be unique, but if Haven doesn't at least have an advanced tactical course of its own, I will be very surprised.