Question about Beowulf tactics

n7axw wrote:
As for Beowulf, I've wondered if that nice extra large SDF wasn't also a preventative measure against retaliation for some of the BSC's more nefarious activities...

Don

Another function of any League SDF is a measure of independence. Even if no one has seriously contemplated secession for so long, the possibility of it may be some small factor in political considerations. If you can maintain an SDF that a Frontier Fleet squadron and OFS intervention battalions could not casually wipe out if you did secede, you've got a bit more wiggle room to kick up a stink in the Assembly. Even without any form of Manticoran assistance, Beowulf's SDF is enough that the SLN cannot brush it aside without making more news than the shadowy apparatchiks in charge of the League would prefer.

I don't blame most League systems for not caring about that - who wants to contemplate the end of Pax Solaria, especially being ground zero for the following Dark Age? - but I can certainly credit the foresight of those, like Beowulf, that have made some investment that way.

Edit: Beowulf's large SDF would also provide cover for (1) budgetary shenanigans to funnel funds to the BSC and black ops, and (2) plenty of screening elements which can go off and nail Manpower installations as discovered.

Vince wrote:
Your memory is playing tricks on you.

What we know from the text in the Honorverse books states that Beowulf has daughter colonies. The plural form of colony has always been used, so we know there are at least two.

But what we have never been told is exactly how many daughter colonies Beowulf has, their names, locations, and what their relationship is with each other and the mother world.

I thought there was textev that Visigoth was a daughter colony of Beowulf?

George J. Smith wrote:

Vince wrote:
Your memory is playing tricks on you.

What we know from the text in the Honorverse books states that Beowulf has daughter colonies. The plural form of colony has always been used, so we know there are at least two.

But what we have never been told is exactly how many daughter colonies Beowulf has, their names, locations, and what their relationship is with each other and the mother world.

I thought there was textev that Visigoth was a daughter colony of Beowulf?

A forum resident (I forget who - SKW perhaps?) recently did a search through the books and RFC's posts and came up with nothing to substantiate Visigoth as a Beowulf colony. Sooo - if there IS that textev, it's been evasive and we have reason to think it came up as speculation or a mistake at some point and got taken as gospel thereafter.

StealthSeeker wrote:
So,... if Beowulf is installing "mycroft" platforms for defense, wouldn't the only missiles they would be interested in producing be the Mark-23 and Mark-23E versions???

n7axw wrote:
There is logic to this, but not the whole picture. The concern expressed earlier was the availability of Apollo in necessary numbers sinse the Apollo pods had not been fully deployed prior to OB. Hence the need to deploy some pre-Apollo pods at Beowulf during the window of vulnerability as well as how we find control links for those pods prior to Mycroft being functional.

The other thing is to note that Beowulf is not only going to be producing missiles to satisfy Mycroft's needs in its own system. It's going to be the missile arsenal of the Alliance for at least the short to intermediate term future. That would mean producing the Mark 23s, the Mark 16s, the vipers for the Kantana LACs and whatever other missiles are going to be needed to serve GA fleet needs, replacing the production capacity lost at OB.

Don

We don't actually know that Apollo had not been fully deployed by the time of OB. It had not been fully deployed at the time of BoM I, but it was 6 months after that before Honor went off to negotiate with Haven, and they would not have taken Eighth fleet out of its position as Home Fleet unless the system defenses had been brought up to snuff. It was a couple of months after that (actually textev is about 4-6 weeks) before OB actually went in. This was time for a substantial number of system defense to have be built. AND, since there were no missiles produced between OB and BoM II, if Manticore had had 2.5 million pods in the home system, the BoM I would have been short and not very sweet (from the Havenite side).

JeffEngel wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:I thought there was textev that Visigoth was a daughter colony of Beowulf?

A forum resident (I forget who - SKW perhaps?) recently did a search through the books and RFC's posts and came up with nothing to substantiate Visigoth as a Beowulf colony. Sooo - if there IS that textev, it's been evasive and we have reason to think it came up as speculation or a mistake at some point and got taken as gospel thereafter.

Right--that was me. I could not find any textev supporting the idea. I did find old forum posts which referred to even earlier forum posts speculating that Visigoth was a daughter colony of Beowulf. But those earlier forum posts with the initial speculation have been lost in one of the data losses on this site. It appears that the concept was pure forum speculation, which was repeated so often that people started assuming it was true.

George J. Smith wrote:I thought there was textev that Visigoth was a daughter colony of Beowulf?

The only place we have text ev of being colonized from Beowulf is, much to the disgust of Beowulf, Mesa.

Castenea wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:I thought there was textev that Visigoth was a daughter colony of Beowulf?

The only place we have text ev of being colonized from Beowulf is, much to the disgust of Beowulf, Mesa.

And amazingly, Mesa is not one of Beowulf's political allies. Ungrateful kids!

Castenea wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:I thought there was textev that Visigoth was a daughter colony of Beowulf?

The only place we have text ev of being colonized from Beowulf is, much to the disgust of Beowulf, Mesa.

I remember reading the back story on that somewhere. Seems that Beowulf has always been a tech/science centric hub of bio sciences within the SL since the beginning (or at least for many centuries) and a "great disagreement" about how far these sciences should be taken occurred. The group that wanted to "expand" what it meant to be "human", through the genetic "improvement" of man, sort of lost the argument and went off to found/occupy/colonize Mesa. So Beowulf and the folks in the MA have been at each other's throats since before Mesa was founded.

All of this, of course, feeds into Beowulf's hatred of cloning and genetic slaves and such. Most likely also has something to do with the unique name of their armed services, their clandestine activities, and their need to have a large SDF.

This also gives the back story on how HH wound up being a "geni" with a much higher metabolism and as a result needs to consume more food than other people. But this story line of the "geni" genetics seems to have a touch of a flaw to it for me. It would seem that for Honor to be a "geni" her mother would also have to be one. Yet I specifically remember the plot line were Honor and her mother are talking about teaching the treecats to communicate via sign language and Honor offered her mother a cookie, which she refused, to keep her weight down. So Honor's mother is not a "geni". I suppose recessive traits can surface, but that would seem improbable. Or did Honor get her "geni" traits through he father??? Honor gets her height from him but I don't remember anything about him being a "geni" too.

StealthSeeker wrote:This also gives the back story on how HH wound up being a "geni" with a much higher metabolism and as a result needs to consume more food than other people. But this story line of the "geni" genetics seems to have a touch of a flaw to it for me. It would seem that for Honor to be a "geni" her mother would also have to be one. Yet I specifically remember the plot line were Honor and her mother are talking about teaching the treecats to communicate via sign language and Honor offered her mother a cookie, which she refused, to keep her weight down. So Honor's mother is not a "geni". I suppose recessive traits can surface, but that would seem improbable. Or did Honor get her "geni" traits through he father??? Honor gets her height from him but I don't remember anything about him being a "geni" too.

Honor got her genetic modifications from her father. Yes, he is a genie, too. It goes all the way back to Honor's great, great, great, great-something family, the first Harringtons who emigrated to Sphinx from Meyerdahl. Meyerdahl was an even higher-grav planet than Sphinx, and genetic modification was almost a necessity to survive there. The genetic modifications were done in such a way that they would permanently dominate (apparently using some technique unknown to 20th century genetics). So the Harringtons of Sphinx have always been genies. In fact, somewhere in the text is the statement that a very large percentage of the population of Sphinx has heavy-grav genetic modifications.

SWM wrote:

StealthSeeker wrote:This also gives the back story on how HH wound up being a "geni" with a much higher metabolism and as a result needs to consume more food than other people. But this story line of the "geni" genetics seems to have a touch of a flaw to it for me. It would seem that for Honor to be a "geni" her mother would also have to be one. Yet I specifically remember the plot line were Honor and her mother are talking about teaching the treecats to communicate via sign language and Honor offered her mother a cookie, which she refused, to keep her weight down. So Honor's mother is not a "geni". I suppose recessive traits can surface, but that would seem improbable. Or did Honor get her "geni" traits through he father??? Honor gets her height from him but I don't remember anything about him being a "geni" too.

Honor got her genetic modifications from her father. Yes, he is a genie, too. It goes all the way back to Honor's great, great, great, great-something family, the first Harringtons who emigrated to Sphinx from Meyerdahl. Meyerdahl was an even higher-grav planet than Sphinx, and genetic modification was almost a necessity to survive there. The genetic modifications were done in such a way that they would permanently dominate (apparently using some technique unknown to 20th century genetics). So the Harringtons of Sphinx have always been genies. In fact, somewhere in the text is the statement that a very large percentage of the population of Sphinx has heavy-grav genetic modifications.

They'd be in poor shape to live there otherwise - they'd be looking at health problems or spending most of their time in housing with grav plates working in the floors. (Put that down as another thing Alison Harrington accepted for the sake of Alfred.) And certainly Sphinx is a good place to move to if you are a heavy worlder and want a new home - it's wide open, the SEM is and has been a great place for personal opportunity and civil rights, and the RMN has liberated more than its share of genetic slaves, some of whom will be suited to high gravity living.

The heavy world modifications like the Meyerdahl mods were designed to get in and edit the genes contributed by the other parent to guarantee being carried on to the offspring. By early 21st century standards, that's way out-there genetic engineering - in effect, getting the sperm or ovum to do a simple genetic engineering job themselves on the DNA contributed by the other parent - but without it, you'd have either heavy worlders growing isolated from the rest of humanity or interbreeding with them only at the risk of offspring who cannot thrive on their birth world. (And yes, RFC's confirmed that it DOES mean that their use of 'dominant' in reference to genes has changed over the course of 2000 years from ours.)

It's an instance where the Beowulf Code permits something that may raise eyebrows here, but remains consistent with their stance that genetic engineering is there to fix problems (such as those you may come by living on Sphinx or San Martin), and not to "fix" people relative to some standard humans assign arbitrarily, for sheer racial "improvement".