Comedy/Tragedy of Errors: Stupidity in the Honorverse

SharkHunter wrote:I was going to say "Steadholder Burdette" coming within sword range of Honor when she was righteously pissed. That said, he did save on his own personal embarrasment and shorten his "trial" down to a few microseconds, and saved the planet the cost of any appeals...

Decapitation will do that for you.

I'll quibble with you on that one. He had absolutely no reason to think that an injured person with less than one year experience with a sword could defeat a master swordsman. It may have been gross underestimation of Honor's ability, as well as ignorance of the difference between battle and competition, but I wouldn't call it stupidity.

It was actually a rather clever idea that would have gotten himself off scott-free and placed the Protector in a bad situation if he had pulled it off. He would almost certainly lose in a trial, and if he won the combat he would win far more than he could in a trial. The outcome if he failed was no worse than failing in a trial--death. From that perspective, combat was no worse than trial and potentially far better--a good risk.

SWM wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:I was going to say "Steadholder Burdette" coming within sword range of Honor when she was righteously pissed. That said, he did save on his own personal embarrasment and shorten his "trial" down to a few microseconds, and saved the planet the cost of any appeals...

Decapitation will do that for you.

I'll quibble with you on that one. He had absolutely no reason to think that an injured person with less than one year experience with a sword could defeat a master swordsman. It may have been gross underestimation of Honor's ability, as well as ignorance of the difference between battle and competition, but I wouldn't call it stupidity.

It was actually a rather clever idea that would have gotten himself off scott-free and placed the Protector in a bad situation if he had pulled it off. He would almost certainly lose in a trial, and if he won the combat he would win far more than he could in a trial. The outcome if he failed was no worse than failing in a trial--death. From that perspective, combat was no worse than trial and potentially far better--a good risk.

Quibble accepted. What proved it to be a "stupid" idea is that he didn't even manage to parry her initial stroke. Of course, my definition of "stupid" also includes "clever overlooking the obvious weakness in the plan".

Allowing Shannon Foraker to upload tactical plans to the new
StateSec SD(s). I believe the key word was.... "Oops".

Preceded shortly by Oscar St. Just NOT replacing Denis LePic as Theisman's political commissioner. But we're glad that it worked out that way in both cases, right?

SharkHunter wrote:Preceded shortly by Oscar St. Just NOT replacing Denis LePic as Theisman's political commissioner.

I always thought it was dumb for St Just to leave political overseers in the same position for extended periods of time or basically permanently assign them to certain officers.

I always wondered why he didn't shuffle his personnel between key assignments every once in a while, if for no other reason, than to get a fresh perspective on what was happening. That simple move would have short circuited any attempts to empire build and would have precluded the chance of a political officer colluding with Navy personnel in any plans to overthrow the government.

I thought that kidnapping Helen Zilwicke was a less than bright move on the part of the Peep ambassador. Using the Scrags was even worse.

Don

jtg452 wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:Preceded shortly by Oscar St. Just NOT replacing Denis LePic as Theisman's political commissioner.

I always thought it was dumb for St Just to leave political overseers in the same position for extended periods of time or basically permanently assign them to certain officers.

I always wondered why he didn't shuffle his personnel between key assignments every once in a while, if for no other reason, than to get a fresh perspective on what was happening. That simple move would have short circuited any attempts to empire build and would have precluded the chance of a political officer colluding with Navy personnel in any plans to overthrow the government.

Hindsight's 20/20. I think he was aware of that danger - Pritchart's professional approval of Javier Giscard would have rung alarm bells if not for her clear (ha!) personal distaste for the man. But by the same token, a commissioner who knows their officer is going to be able to keep tabs on them better. It was secondary for St. Just, but another factor was that a working pair of officer and commissioner would get results, without which you don't have a use for either of them.

Changing commissioners may give a canny flag officer a chance to communicate intentions to juniors in two parts, under each commissioner, that neither commissioner would catch but the junior officers would. It'd take a twisty operator to make that work, but that's a fine description of St. Just and McQueen both.

Comedy/Tragedy

Lack of power cords in the Honorverse

Honorverse Economics are just a Comedy

Manticore has 100% population with prolong and yet very few actually build a fleet for a nation on the cusp of its very survival. With prolong very small percentage are the too old to work or too young to work category leaving well over 75% of population for war whereas without prolong this number is maybe 50% if you really push it.

SharkHunter wrote:Allowing Shannon Foraker to upload tactical plans to the new
StateSec SD(s). I believe the key word was.... "Oops".

Preceded shortly by Oscar St. Just NOT replacing Denis LePic as Theisman's political commissioner. But we're glad that it worked out that way in both cases, right?

Nah! Pissing Shannon off to the point that it awakened her to the real world is what was stupid!

She was content to play with her 'puters.

But noooo, they wanted to awaken a sleeping giantess

Planning a coup on Protector's Palace, but not allowing for the most dangerous person there, Nimitz, was painfully stupid.

Nimitz, <Oh no they di-int.>

Honorverse Economics are just a Comedy

Say hello to the twin beasts of socialism and private enterprise. If 99% of your economy goes effectively to welfare (if you're a Peep) or to civilian companies (if you're a Manty), there's little left for your fleet. And when you try to shift into a war footing, there is a) the problem of affording military infrastructure you didn't have in both time and money and b) the amount of fools opposed to "wasting" money on the military regardless of the situation. In comparison, Grayson managed to build 2/3 the ships Manticore had despite having 1/5 the total economic strength because they are neither socialists nor capitalists.



Generally speaking, a population should be capable of comfortably affording 1% of its population going to the military. That would be nearly 50 million people for the manticore system. 20 million in the industrial sector, 20 million in the support/administration/infrastructure sector and 10 million sailors and officers.

That would amount to 4.000+ fully crewed SDs.