Suspension of Disbelief.

Weird Harold wrote:

hanuman wrote:Firstly, the wear and tear on the mother's body because of near-constant pregnancy has such a detrimental effect on her long-term health that her life expectancy can typically be anything from twenty to thirty years lower than that of a mother in a developed society.

Yep, Honorverse colonists are almost certain to wear out the artificial wombs they brought along.

Honorverse (colonist) women can have as many children as they wish without any health penalty through "tubing" babies. They can even have multiple, simultaneous, children without health penalties. That would be especially useful for a brand new colony since fewer colonists would need to travel and more supplies and artificial wombs can be shipped instead.

Harold, I specifically responded to a statement that having many children is not hugely expensive for poor people in impoverished societies.

JustCurious wrote:

Silverwall wrote:Along with the dumb as rocks computers and genetics mistakes my other pet peeve is a bit of a minor one.

I really dislike using the Washington Treaty era ship clasification system (FF, DD, CL, CA, BC, BB, DN, SD) given the roles of the ships and the way they are deployed along with the paralells to the Nelsonian period navies. It would have been much better in my mind to have used the Royal navy "Rate" system. The CA/CL distinction is particularly egregious but the DN/SD one is also fairly bad/

This would also make the discrepencies of a RMN dreadnought (Bellerophon 7.2 mtons) being considered inferior to a SL Superdreadnought (Scientist 6.9 mtons)

FF, DD, and CL would be below the rating system and called corvettes, sloops etc commanded by a LT to captain JG.

CA and BC would be 6th and 5th rates respectivly and called frigates and commanded by a senior grade captain of the list.

BB's are the obsolete 4th rates or the BCL nike's

DN and SD would be 3rd to 1st rate depending on weight and broadside.

To me this sould be a much better system as the CA, CL distinction only exists because of the washington and London treaties limiting cruiser armament and are far inferior to more natural titles used at the time such as protected, scout, destroyer leader etc.

maybe it's a petty gripe but I do find it jaring.

Agree completely. Use of CA for heavy cruiser only is silly because the USN used CA only because the treaty cruisers were replacing armoured cruisers which had had CA designations. But the treaty cruisers were derived from pre World War 1 light cruisers not from armoured cruisers. In World War 1 the USN had very few light cruisers and like many others was using armoured cruisers much of the time in light cruiser roles. Also battle cruisers had reduced the effectiveness of older armoured cruisers in their designed roles. But without this historical accident the use of CA rather than say CH for heavy cruiser makes no sense.
The use of dreadnought and super dreadnought for categories of capital ship larger than battleship is also grating. Historically they were not ship classifications but developmental stages of the battleship. They were always classed as battleships. A dreadnought was a battleship with a ballistically uniform main armament. A super-dreadnought was a very vaguely defined category but usually was a dreadnought with a main armament bore greater than 12 inches. Actuall using the term at all was a sort of hype. So how the hell did these terms get revived and applied tho the larger capital ships? Historically the term dreadnought reflect an abrupt technological change. RFC has given no indication of any such event in the Honorverse.

Enh? Somebody (probably Solarian?) in a position of power back in the day was a big fan of an Pre-Diaspora board game called Starfire and rammed the game's ship nomenclature down Jayne's throat because he could. Problem solved.

Please forgive my snipping and transplanting of an appendage from the body of your post, Jeff.

JeffEngel wrote:Given how limited Honorverse AI is, there's no plausible way that you could expect intelligent advice out of one that combines knowledge of politics, diplomacy, strategy, psychology, and economics. Not at that high level - extrapolating target choice from prior attacks is vastly easier. So no, there really shouldn't - barring vastly better computing than exists there - be an op-for political adviser in Admiralty House.

True. But that was my point. The disbelief that we can't count on that kind of performance from Honorverse A.I.

What I see as the hindrance in that ability now is the power and efficiency of current processors vs fast storage and not the lack of capable programmers. The programming expertise (and the language - my favorite, Lisp) is available even today - but not within the limited conformity of current technology.

In the Honorverse, the processing power is a given. Therefore, I cannot believe the lack of programming prowess of Honorverse programmers in the creation of that type of "expert system."

I've been playing with computers as long as I've been playing with myself. At one point, I became independently ambidextrous. And, Oh the things I can achieve with Honorverse computing power. Why, I could take over the world, Pinky!
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JustCurious wrote:

kzt wrote:Pretty much all pre-modern societies were run by men. Even the examples people cherry pick are usually not true if yo look below the surface. That's just how human societies across the planet have organized themselves, so it's pretty likely to reflect something deeper than culture.

But we've never had a society with such a lopsided sex ratio. Especially on Grayson where they had such a harsh environment and life was marginal under employing women is something that I can't see them being able to afford to do.
On Masada the society wide hostility towards women on the part of the men would leave the men with little in the way of emotional connection. And with women outnumbering them it is hard to see them getting away with it. The murder rate on Masada would be very high. Both killings of women by men and the other way round.

There are historical examples where for a generation or two the ratio of women to men had been almost catastrophically high, because of war fatalities. The main reason why Muhammad, for example, authorized polygamy in the new Muslim community he was setting up, was because of the high numbers of widows and orphans who were left destitute by the Muslim wars of conquest.

I do get your point, though. Never in real history have there been such a high sex imbalance for such an extended period of time.

Also, wrt Masada, I'd expect to see a high incidence of homosexual relationships, both among men and women, specifically because of the emotional disconnect you mentioned - hidden, maybe, but humans need emotional input and to express that input physically, and if sexuality is a function of both nature and nurture as the current thinking among scientists holds, then people will seek that emotional connection they need among their own kind if they cannot find it among the opposite sex.

hanuman wrote:Hey guys, I've seen several posts that complain about the failure to encounter advanced, space faring alien species.

I think it is worthwhile to remember that humanity, by the time of "On Basilisk Station', had settled a volume of space about a thousand light years across. Humans might have explored a few hundred light years beyond that, but not much more. That is a tiny volume of space compared to the size of our galaxy, which according to Wikipedia has a diameter of 100 000 - 120 000, maybe even as much as 150 000 - 180 000, light years.

There is no logical reason to insist that more than one advanced, space faring species would have evolved within such a tiny volume of space, or within a slightly larger volume that would have enabled humans to detect them in the two-and-half or three millennia since the advent of modern astronomy.

Even within the volume of space that humans have explored, they had encountered at least two relatively advanced species, and had discovered the remnants of one non-canonical extinct space faring species.

Don't get me wrong, it's entirely possible that somewhere in the Honorverse Milky Way several or even many advanced space faring species might have evolved in close proximity to each other, at more or less the same time as humans (or even much earlier). However, it seems illogical to me to expect a generally even spread of such advanced civilizations across the galaxy. Far more probable that the emergence of space faring civilizations would occur in patches of relative abundance in a field of relative scarcity. And that, in case of the Honorverse, humanity just happened to evolve in one of the less densely-'populated' regions of space.

That's an interesting way to look at things. And I think, explains things away quite well. Except...

I, and some others, probably disagree with you on the density of space-faring species in the universe. We undoubtedly disagree with your probable stance on whether the Sol system has already been visited.

Heck, I steer clear of Lord Skimper's 'Strange Things and UFOs' thread in the Free Range section out of fear. Not fear that no one will believe me. But fear that someone will. More pointedly, someone I don't wish to believe me. Or rather, I don't wish to call attention to certain... things.

Which fuels my disbelief that in even the relatively short distances represented by the Honorverse that there hasn't been a lot of junked ships from human to alien encounters.

Edit: typo.

With Beatrice there are lots. For example, the whining of the crews on Weyland station in MoH essentially says that Mantcore didn't evacuate the stations around Sphinx. There were 200 hostile SDs coming in, and they were deep inside effective missile range, and that wasn't enough to trigger and evacuation? What exactly WOULD be sufficient to interrupt everyone's day?

From the other side, why the heck didn't 2nd fleet blow up the sphinx orbital infrastructure and also send 5th against manticore instead of trying their overly clever trick? That is the vast majority of the industrial power of the Manticore system, and if you trash them while still having your own construction capability the war is OVER. Even if you lose every single ship involved. And it's not improbable that you'll have enough surviving combat power to take out Gryphon for a clean sweep.

kzt wrote:With Beatrice there are lots. For example, the whining of the crews on Weyland station in MoH essentially says that Mantcore didn't evacuate the stations around Sphinx. There were 200 hostile SDs coming in, and they were deep inside effective missile range, and that wasn't enough to trigger and evacuation? What exactly WOULD be sufficient to interrupt everyone's day?

From the other side, why the heck didn't 2nd fleet blow up the sphinx orbital infrastructure and also send 5th against manticore instead of trying their overly clever trick? That is the vast majority of the industrial power of the Manticore system, and if you trash them while still having your own construction capability the war is OVER. Even if you lose every single ship involved. And it's not improbable that you'll have enough surviving combat power to take out Gryphon for a clean sweep.

I thought this was explained in the text as wanting to avoid an accidental Eridani edict violation (CF the Yawata strike fallout) and you don't want to expend your biggest and best salvo on what is effectivly a non combat target when there is a large powerful fleet bearing down on you.

Silverwall wrote:I thought this was explained in the text as wanting to avoid an accidental Eridani edict violation (CF the Yawata strike fallout) and you don't want to expend your biggest and best salvo on what is effectivly a non combat target when there is a large powerful fleet bearing down on you.

And the failure to evacuate? That was due to what?

cthia wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:That'd give a fair illusion of, what most other sci-fi's would refer to as a "stupid AI", useful in a very restricted/limited way, and unable to (or uninterested to) learn other things that don't relate to what it was made to do.

The stumbling block there and a seemingly insurmountable obstacle is Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the Halting problem.

All AI, in my book, are going to be stupid in that context. Clearing that hurdle may lead to the kind of AI that will outpace our niche for it. A truly thinking AI would engineer its own Manifest Destiny.

There was a thread on A.I. post visited by RFC.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5679&hilit=artificial+intelligence

Hmm, some good stuff there. Maybe I'm a bit biased by my love of the HALO universe, Dahak series, and the Weber books playing around with the Live Free or Die series.

Off the HALO wiki anyways:

Smart AIs, or A.I.s that are not confined to their one purpose, have a normal operational life span of about seven years. Because the "Smart" A.I. is subject to an established memory core which cannot be replaced, the more the A.I. collects data, the less "thinking" space it has to work with. An A.I. will literally "think" itself to death. Dumb A.I.s do not have this problem as they do not learn anything that is outside of their set limits of a dynamic memory processing matrix. They are quite useful in their particular field of expertise, but very limited. Smart A.I.s can function and learn as long as they are active.

Now that's just the HALO universe that gives a hard limit on how long a so-called smart AI lives, and a limitation of memory storage (which could be argued in honorverse is terrible).

edit: after poking through the thread a bit, you actually covered more or less how I define AI's cthia, you just label them as weak and strong. I label them as dumb, and smart. Dumb being very very specific (chess master AI I'd call dumb, but you'd call weak... we're still talking the same thing though)

The pearl, (http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/142/1) really boils down to trying to suggest that the computers in Honoverse have AI influence, rather than sophisticated programming that gives the illusion of AI. Even the dumbest AI in most other sci-fi's is vastly brighter than computers in Honoverse.

If you threw a smart AI, such as Cortana, who can, does, and until she finally goes rampant and 'dies' will continue to take independent action on her own initiative. Rather than sit and report to an organic and wait for instructions to take advantage of X weakness, such as the Thunder of God versus CA Fearless example of the pearl

The problem Thunder of God had in Honor of the Queen was that her AI was far inferior to Fearless' to begin with and that her tactical officers didn't really understand when and how to get out of the way. When they finally made the decision to hand over to computer control, effectively completely, their offensive fire was vastly more effective than it had been while half-trained human operators were getting in the way. Where they got into trouble was that they were unable -- because of their inexperience -- to recognize that their idiot Havenite artificial so-called intelligence was repeating its defensive tactics in a predictable cycle, which Fearless' systems recognized and brought to Rafe Cardones' attention, requesting human operator input to decide what to do about it. At which point Rafe blew the crap out of the vastly more powerful ship.

A 'smart' AI would have just done it, a 'dumb' AI, if it was setup in such a way that... for example, being at action stations allows it to enter the decision queue if it picks up a weakness that can be exploited (like the above predictable weakness) it can make the orders itself, thus freeing the tactical officer's attention slightly for other considerations.

And reading through the thread a bit, it looks like there is indeed a general ban on AI period, or at least the sort of AI we (or maybe just me) defines as AI, while calling the generic programming AI. After all, it's not like talking to the tactical computers for example, would lead anywhere except maybe getting 'error, input not understood' message

cthia wrote:Please forgive my snipping and transplanting of an appendage from the body of your post, Jeff.

JeffEngel wrote:Given how limited Honorverse AI is, there's no plausible way that you could expect intelligent advice out of one that combines knowledge of politics, diplomacy, strategy, psychology, and economics. Not at that high level - extrapolating target choice from prior attacks is vastly easier. So no, there really shouldn't - barring vastly better computing than exists there - be an op-for political adviser in Admiralty House.

True. But that was my point. The disbelief that we can't count on that kind of performance from Honorverse A.I.

What I see as the hindrance in that ability now is the power and efficiency of current processors vs fast storage and not the lack of capable programmers. The programming expertise (and the language - my favorite, Lisp) is available even today - but not within the limited conformity of current technology.

In the Honorverse, the processing power is a given. Therefore, I cannot believe the lack of programming prowess of Honorverse programmers in the creation of that type of "expert system."

The processing power isn't a given in the Honorverse. Nothing you would expect of computing power in 23 odd centuries is.

Also, if the Honorverse did have better computers, what you propose would be among the last things likely to yield to programming. They'll be generating symphonies, proving theorems (even in "interesting" fashions), and developing new weapon systems more or less on their own before they're good military and political analysts.

At that point, humans probably won't have much to do but amuse ourselves and hope our silicon overlords appreciate us as pets. Is that something to expect in 23 centuries? Maybe. But if it's hard to suspend disbelief that that won't be achieved already, everything else is likely harder.

I've been playing with computers as long as I've been playing with myself. At one point, I became independently ambidextrous.

... The post! The post! It's like a minefield, for the mind!

And, Oh the things I can achieve with Honorverse computing power. Why, I could take over the world, Pinky

The same thing you do every night?