Comparing weapons

ChronicRder wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:There was a period when the "heaviest", Line-of-Battle Ships were referred to as "Liners", i.e. fit to stand in the line of battle, before the generic term Battleship became the normal usage

Actually, the original formulation of liner was line-of-battle-ship; that is, a ship suited to lie in the line of battle. That was then shortened to ship-of-the-line, but the term battleship was also applied very early on and never quite went away. The main thing that happens in naval jargon is that as new terminology is needed for changing technical and tactical parameters, old terminology is as likely to be refurbished or recycled as new terminology is likely to be invented.

Which provides lots of opportunities for "false cognates" to bite the casual reader on his gluteus maximus!

Lovely. And this is always the case? Excellent at finding new and better ways to kill our enemies every generation, but using old or refurbished names for them because we're too linguistically lazy to come up with something just as new?

Wait.

You have casual readers?[/quote]

Wouldn't call it lazy so much as inevitable. Look how long it took ship-of-the-line to mutate into the battleship in the form that most post-WW II people visualize it. As a general rule, the ship type evolves and the label's meaning evolves right along with it. The sailing ship-of-the-line became the battleship of the Royal Sovereign/Devastation type, which evolved into the pre-dreadnought, which evolved into the semi-dreadnought, which evolved into the dreadnought, which evolved into the super-dreadnought, being called a "battleship" all the while because it's function hadn't shifted. Then the term "dreadnought" became (in fairly common usage) synonymous with "battleship" (there weren't any pre-dreadnoughts around anymore, after all, and the terminology shifted a little further.

The point is that human beings look for analagous terminology to help them organize their thinking. So if you have a ship which fills the same role --- albeit in a space environment --- that the wet-navy battleship filled in a waterborne environment, people are going to call it a "battleship" because that carries an entire trove of implications (some of which, admittedly, will be less than accurate) along with it. It's a useful label, because the shorthand connections for what it means have already been entered into the language. About the only people who might not automatically reach for that label would probably be Air Force types trying to keep the Squids from claiming control of deep-space combat vessels, and it's worth noting how often they use the term "ship" to describe an aircraft. Which, of course, is evolved from "airship," which (in turn) is evolved from "ship" and . . .

Then the term "dreadnought" became (in fairly common usage) synonymous with "battleship" (there weren't any pre-dreadnoughts around anymore, after all, and the terminology shifted a little further.

I can´t agree that DN ever became synonymous with BB in wetnavy history.

Pre-WWI to not so far post WWI there were "pre-Dreadnought battleships" and "((super)Dreadnought) battleships", after that it was just plain "battleships" again, as "Dreadnought" never replaced battleship, but rather was used as a sub-type designation.

From mid-late 1920s i´m not sure if i can find anyone that actually uses "Dreadnought" as a ship class reference any longer at all.

Just look at the naval treaties from 1922 and onwards, battleship is the normal name, the word dreadnought isn´t there at all, either it´s capital ship or battleship.

Tenshinai wrote:

Then the term "dreadnought" became (in fairly common usage) synonymous with "battleship" (there weren't any pre-dreadnoughts around anymore, after all, and the terminology shifted a little further.

I can´t agree that DN ever became synonymous with BB in wetnavy history.

Pre-WWI to not so far post WWI there were "pre-Dreadnought battleships" and "((super)Dreadnought) battleships", after that it was just plain "battleships" again, as "Dreadnought" never replaced battleship, but rather was used as a sub-type designation.

From mid-late 1920s i´m not sure if i can find anyone that actually uses "Dreadnought" as a ship class reference any longer at all.

Just look at the naval treaties from 1922 and onwards, battleship is the normal name, the word dreadnought isn´t there at all, either it´s capital ship or battleship.

I'd disagree with you slightly. For technical terminology, you're probably correct. In common English usage (while there were battleships still in commission), dreadnought is used very commonly for "battleships with all big gun batteries" in accounts, histories, etc. Admittedly, "super" is often appended as a prefix, but the term was always a bit slippery outside professional circles ("professional" in this case being naval and the diplomatic elements dealing specifically with naval matters like the post-1921 disarmament conferences). Do note that I said "in fairly common usage," not "in every case and technically correctly."

runsforcelery wrote:
I'd disagree with you slightly. For technical terminology, you're probably correct. In common English usage (while there were battleships still in commission), dreadnought is used very commonly for "battleships with all big gun batteries" in accounts, histories, etc. Admittedly, "super" is often appended as a prefix, but the term was always a bit slippery outside professional circles ("professional" in this case being naval and the diplomatic elements dealing specifically with naval matters like the post-1921 disarmament conferences). Do note that I said "in fairly common usage," not "in every case and technically correctly."

After going over my available books on the subject, the best i can find is "Indeed, the word "dreadnought" became a synonym for battleship during the period leading up to world war I". (and another 7 mentions that are effectively the same in different words)

And scanning through it, use of the word after WWI is extremely scarce, and it is then also not used as a shipclass statement but as a subtype statement, ie "dreadnought battleship", last one like that i can find is 1935 on a photo of HMS Queen Elizabeth. And last one before that is 1924 or 1926. Not a single photo or mention of battleships in between that uses the word at all.

And the word is used hundreds of times in the books regarding the time 1906 to 1915, 1916 to 1919 its still used dozens of times, after that it´s less than a dozen times total until 1935, after that i can find no use of the word again until in modern scifi, which is actually the first place i read it used as a shipclass rather than as a subtype of a shipclass.

In short from what i can find and have read before, as long as there were still "pre-dreadnoughts" around, it remains in use, and during the pre-WWI arms races, it´s everywhere, even used on its own, but once battleships are back to all being "post-DN" and newer, i´m just not seeing it as a common use definition.

Anyway, never mind me, i´m just picky because i´m waiting for more books...

The term super-dreadnaught was first used by the British press to describe the Queen Elizabeth class battleships it was later applied somewhat too the USN's New York class because these were the ships with the first really big guns shooting heavy shells. Prior to this most battleships had 12 or 13.5 inch guns with shells that weighed 9-1200 lbs. While the 14 inch (NY) weighed 1500 lbs and 15 inch (QE) weighed 1900 lbs. That was an average of a 50% increase in shell weight.

Relying on the popular press to make distinctions clearly is perhaps optimistic. I have recently seen, but did not want to take note of details, articles referring to American battleships on active duty in the current navy. As much perusal of article as I could stand made clear that these were references to a Zumwalt-class DDG.

A lot of Science Fiction writers have a tendency to use the technologies advaible in their times, in their stories set far into the future. It seems to me that the Tech that Merlin and Nimue use are only slightly advanced from the Tech in use today. I would think that the fabrication abilities in the cave would be producing much more advanced weapons. Take for instance explosives, nuclear weapons are a million times more powerful than chemical weapons. I would think that in the 400 years between now and the destruction of the TF explosives would be created to bridge the gap, Metalic Hydrogen for instance. I feel that we should be seeing more Arnold Schwarzenegger's liquid metal exterminators instead of the mechanical one in the first movie. Just saying, I would expect the mechanical one to be developed 100 years from now and the liquid metal one 400 years from now. My 2 cents.

6L6 wrote: It seems to me that the Tech that Merlin and Nimue use are only slightly advanced from the Tech in use today. I would think that the fabrication abilities in the cave would be producing much more advanced weapons.

You must have missed the theme that Merlin (and Nimue) are trying to stimulate innovation on Safehold.

OWL can and does produce tech far beyond current Safehold levels -- if only 22nd-century-or-so by R/W standards. Merlin could use Nukes and/or Kinetic Energy weapons to destroy the CoGA and assume absolute dictatorship of Safehold, but he's be stuck with a 10th century population trying to adapt to 24th century technology without any understanding of how or why it works. It could have been done that way, but it wouldn't have been the story MWW wanted to tell.

6L6 wrote:A lot of Science Fiction writers have a tendency to use the technologies advaible in their times, in their stories set far into the future. It seems to me that the Tech that Merlin and Nimue use are only slightly advanced from the Tech in use today. I would think that the fabrication abilities in the cave would be producing much more advanced weapons. Take for instance explosives, nuclear weapons are a million times more powerful than chemical weapons. I would think that in the 400 years between now and the destruction of the TF explosives would be created to bridge the gap, Metalic Hydrogen for instance. I feel that we should be seeing more Arnold Schwarzenegger's liquid metal exterminators instead of the mechanical one in the first movie. Just saying, I would expect the mechanical one to be developed 100 years from now and the liquid metal one 400 years from now. My 2 cents.

Have you ever read the end of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court? If not, do so now. Symbolically, the end is very powerful, actually, though written in straightforward, nonpreachy prose.

That book explores much the same themes as David is exploring here...however coming to a much different ending. Well I hope so, at least. Certainly David is making Merlin make use of methods that are meant to avoid the mistakes of the Boss. Your suggested methods are almost precisely those of the Boss.

You can be utterly sure David has read this book. Or so I think.

Technically speaking, Nimue's Cave CAN produce 24th century tech... and has in the form of a second PICA. However, beyond the social issues mentioned by others, there's two factors to consider:

1) Producing a PICA ran the Cave's stocks of certain elements critically low. Odds are, those elements are unlikely to be plentiful on Safehold and likely require a space mining infrastructure to replenish those elements in anything like a timely manner. And Merlin simply doesn't have that infrastructure.

2) Federation tech can have some utterly unique signatures that just can't be mistaken for anything else. There's no way advanced sensors belonging to the other side are going to mistake a nuclear explosion for a natural event for example. Merlin's been doing everything he could to avoid giving off those signatures where hostile sensors might pick them up.