Honorverse ramblings and musings

JeffEngel wrote:

cthia wrote:But do the majority of them view the League as impotent? They've been sheltered and cut off from reality for years, just as their League parent. If I were a League system governor, I'd claim descendence from Missouri. "Show me that you can defeat the Big Bad Bully permanently - they've suffered black-eyes before - then I'll jump ship. Until then, I ain't gonna be making no bed that I may have to lay in if you get your arse whipped. We been there, done that al-ready." It is us who have to live with the League's brand of "negative feedback" should you lose."

It'd also go hard on the last people to jump off the sinking ship - they're going to be the ones racking up the crappy reputation with their independent neighbors - they'll be the ones who, to all appearances, prolonged the bitter war on behalf of the dead criminal empire. And after all of the rest do the somewhat courageous thing, then they are supposed to jump ship and make nice? That's the sort of thing that's going to leave your name mud in the hereafter.

Being from Missouri shouldn't mean that you have to be skeptical to the point of silliness in precisely one direction and gullible to and past that point in the other one. If it does, it's a bit you want to leave out of your ancestral accounts.

System governments get elected, in more or less representative governments. The League government itself is NOT a typical example of how the system governments do things: the serious system governments made sure that the kiddie table got set up so it couldn't commit the adults to crazy crap. (And you know that their descendants right now are seeing that the arrangement did not work, what with the commitments the... people in Old Chicago have done with the League's fleet and the mess they've made with "its" freighters.) System governments, where they're not representative of a thoughtful, percipient electorate, are representative of thoughtful, percipient transtellars, and they're even less impressed with the Old Chicago crew.

The League voters (or potential, or theoretical voters) who can afford not to pay much attention to the real world may be buying what Education and Information is peddling, although the adults in the room may be tugging their sleeves and pointing them at the real world if those low-information voters need to know about it. The ones who do have to pay attention to the real world - or do just for kicks - know better than to buy what EdIn offers, may have heard a bit from observers out in the Haven Sector, cousins on Beowulf, people in interstellar trade. Audrey O'Hanrahan, etc.

So yeah - the pig-ignorant Sollies aren't the ones driving. The criminally arrogant ones are, sure, but they've regarded the League as a source of graft and patronage forever. That's the source of their "loyalty" to it. It's not continuing. It's not coming back.

Something else I never got the chance to bring up. I was too busy dodging blows. LOL

Let's say the League disintegrates. There are still plenty of Solarians that detest anything Haven-sector neobarbaric. And now that their League has been broken apart, their loathing has become obsessively amped. What's stopping new polities from forming and inheriting most of the significant industrial capacity of the League and come a-calling down the road, and not too distant from a certain off-ramp from EXIT IV: Interstate-Vengeance? With a new and more efficient government.

A breakup within the League could serve to be just the thing they need. A trimming of the corrupt fat.

Well. The polities breaking off from the League will be ones that regard it as a failure, and its pointless confrontation with the Havenite sorts on behalf of bureaucrat honor (!) as the last stupid straw. It's hard to blame the Havenite sorts in that story. Heck, the rump League would be the target of the rage, and systems would be in a hurry to disassociate themselves from it.

It's not someone smashing the League up so much as people offering the League a stage on which to show the members they don't want to be its members. You may be grumpy about that, but you're not going to be an enraged killer.

George J. Smith wrote:Can a Plasma Torpedo be used in a grav-wave or in a Wormhole junction?

Theemile wrote:But if a e-torp works, so can a graser, with >2x as much range and is effective against sidewalls, where even the weakest sidewall will deflect an etorp. Of course no ship may have a sidewall in a junction emergence lane, but grasers allow you (The Defender) to stand further back, where your sidewalls will blunt more of the return fire, limiting your damage; while in e-torp range, grasers and lasers can burn through your sidewalls, making you vulnerable to fire from the invading ship.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:But if a e-torp works, so can a graser, with >2x as much range and is effective against sidewalls, where even the weakest sidewall will deflect an etorp. Of course no ship may have a sidewall in a junction emergence lane, but grasers allow you (The Defender) to stand further back, where your sidewalls will blunt more of the return fire, limiting your damage; while in e-torp range, grasers and lasers can burn through your sidewalls, making you vulnerable to fire from the invading ship.

One nitpick, we know that spherical sidewall generators were tested for use in grav waves; they were dropped because there were better things you can do with that volume and cost -- things that help in a warships routine combat rather than just the rarest of exceptional combat.
But if they work in a grav wave there's no particular reason to believe they wouldn't work in a junction emergence lane.

So I suppose you could custom build a ship that could bring up (spherical) sidewalls once it popped through a junction and before it cleared the lane. Of course that doesn't prevent dozens of missile pods from tearing you apart anyway

cthia wrote:Question.

I was reading through some facts on a site, (unofficial site I'm sure). It listed the mass of a missile at 80 tons???

The only problem I have with that is recalling a passage in storyline where some officers were trying to manually carry a missile, move a missile? That would be impossible!


Am I correctly recalling a scene from storyline or is this media bleed from another source? I know one of the engineers (Santos I believe) was pinned by a missile, but she was left because of the containment field problem.

I'm wondering if my brain is bleeding info from the Star Trek scene where they were struggling to get Spock's jury rigged torp to and into the launch tubes.

http://wikibin.org/articles/weapons-tec ... verse.html

cthia wrote:Question.

I was reading through some facts on a site, (unofficial site I'm sure). It listed the mass of a missile at 80 tons???

The only problem I have with that is recalling a passage in storyline where some officers were trying to manually carry a missile, move a missile? That would be impossible!


Am I correctly recalling a scene from storyline or is this media bleed from another source? I know one of the engineers (Santos I believe) was pinned by a missile, but she was left because of the containment field problem.

I'm wondering if my brain is bleeding info from the Star Trek scene where they were struggling to get Spock's jury rigged torp to and into the launch tubes.

http://wikibin.org/articles/weapons-tec ... verse.html

On Basilisk Station: Ch 31 wrote:Sally MacBride bent her own back to the struggle, and the seventy-ton missile floated across the passage. The overhead tractor rails were out, and the passage was open to space. Her vac-suited people grunted and strained, manhandling the ten-meter-long projectile, leaning their weight desperately against it to point it down the shaft to Missile Two's magazine. The counter-grav collars reduced its weight to zero, but they couldn't do anything about momentum and inertia. [...] Another savage concussion shook the ship, smashing the boat bay to wreckage, and the missile twisted like a malevolent beast. It broke away from its handlers [...] Seventy tons of mass slammed into her