(SPOILERS) Expected defeat at Beowulf.

Duckk wrote:

munroburton wrote:It's been theorised that there are multiple voting options open to Assembly delegates: Aye, nay, veto and abstain. In other words, it may be possible to vote against a motion without invoking the veto.

The strongest signpost of this was when a quarter of the delegates voted against commissioning an inquiry into Beowulf's actions and no mention of a veto was made. There is no explanation of why no veto was attempted by any of Beowulf's allies within the League, however.

That's probably because it wasn't League legislation they were voting on. They were simply voting on an administrative item (formation of factfinding committee) which isn't subject to mutual veto.

Brigade XO wrote: snip-

The SL Bureaucracy and all of it's departments also became little kingdoms within the League based on the power of creating regulations & rules, with a lot of money and power to be made.

There were really no controls on what was going on. The systems within the bureaucracy (and that includes the SLN) evolved into what they became as they kept adjusting the administrative rules and "policy" as it went along. The Letter of the Law was an empty piece of paper with the administrativly creaty regulations and "usual and customary practice" set in place for the actual running of most things.

-snip

Hutch wrote:

Dafmeister wrote:Before we veer off into a discussion of US constitutional law (fun though that always is to observe from the eastern side of the Pond), something recently struck me.

RFC has talked about ten million casualties at Beowulf, and this seems to have been interpreted as the result of a strike on the planet. Is that necessarily the case, though? Ten million isn't all that many on a system-wide scale - it would only be about 0.3% of the population of the Manticore Binary System. Now, Manticore has three inhabited planets to Beowulf's one, but Beowulf's a lot older, old enough to have taken a lead role in the relief of Earth after the Final War, centuries before the Manticore colonists touched down at Landing. I don't have population figures for Beowulf to hand, but if the system population is less than Manticore's I'll be stunned, especially as we know from Alison and Alfred's back-story that one of the reasons they moved to Sphinx was that there were no controls on family size, implying that Beowulf had a large enough population to warrant such controls.

That being the case, how much of Beowulf's system population doesn't live on Beowulf itself? What do we know about the population of their equivalent of the Unicorn Belt (assuming Beowulf has one)? What sort of casualties could be caused by an attack on the belter facilities if it was deliberately targeted on the civilian population? Even Apollo system-defence missiles controlled by Mycroft might not be able to prevent such an attack - they could destroy the attacking ships, but against civilian habitats, the attacking missiles should be able to do the job without guidance support.

And... doesn't the Eridani Edict specifically protect the civilian population of planets, not systems?

Excellent points, and (as the one who introduced this little tidbit from listening to the MWW at LibertyCon), the Words of Weber (as I recall) was that he was working on killing off 10 million Beowulfians, but he did not specify how or where or when in the narrative that may happen.

Press on.

ChronicRder wrote:So...after reading several pages of this...when are we getting snippets in the Honorverse like we get in Safehold?

JohnRoth wrote:

ChronicRder wrote:So...after reading several pages of this...when are we getting snippets in the Honorverse like we get in Safehold?

kzt wrote:We could take turns making up snippets until Duckk notices...

ChronicRder wrote:So...after reading several pages of this...when are we getting snippets in the Honorverse like we get in Safehold?

JohnRoth wrote:This is in the wrong thread.

ChronicRder wrote:No. This is definitely the right thread. It's got the spoiler disclaimer and everything. It even has to deal with a major plot point.

JohnRoth wrote:

ChronicRder wrote:So...after reading several pages of this...when are we getting snippets in the Honorverse like we get in Safehold?

JohnRoth wrote:This is in the wrong thread.

ChronicRder wrote:No. This is definitely the right thread. It's got the spoiler disclaimer and everything. It even has to deal with a major plot point.

If you look to the left, you'll see the number of posts a person has made. When someone says that a comment is in the wrong thread, and when that person has well over a thousand posts, maybe you should figure he might just know what he's talking about and listen instead of attempting to justify your mistake.

The proper thread for a question about when the next book is coming out is in a thread asking when the next book is coming out, not in some other randomly selected thread. There are a fair number of them, since a lot of people who are new to the forum have this exact question, and start a new thread when the last one isn't on the front page any more.

BTW - the reason this thread has a spoiler warning is because it contains a discussion of an overheard comment RFC made at a convention about the number of casualties he was planning on for the upcoming Battle of Beowulf. Asking about the next book isn't a spoiler. We all want to know that!